How do you reduce the size of a PDF without drastically decreasing image quality?

Question

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reduce pdf file size

I have a 80MB PDF that i need to reduce the file size of. Is there any way to reduce the file size without drastically decreasing image quality? I intend to import the PDF into Evernote and Evernote has a 50MB maximum PDF attachment policy.

Answer 1

also refer to @afrazier's answer

I guess for your purpose your PDF is most likely composed of scanned bookpages. In this case, a very common mistake of acquiring image is to acquire the pictures in full color instead of e.g. 256 colors / grayscale although the JPEG/JPEG2000 format make the distinction relatively small, but it's there.

Answer 2

If the PDF is mostly images... probably not.

You might get lucky and all those images are uncompressed bitmaps, but most likely you'd have to downsample the images and that can have a very bad effect on the images. If they're photos, a small amount of resampling and some JPEG compression won't be too noticeable. If they're screenshots, you're in trouble -- any downsampling or JPEG compression is going to make a mess of them.

Acrobat's PDF Optimizer can tell you where the space is being used and has a fair number of options for resampling/recompressing images.

Is the PDF available anywhere for others to take a look?

Answer 3

If the PDF contains text rendered as images, you might be able to use OCR software to convert a lot of it to text, thereby reducing the size by a very large factor and simultaneously improving the quality.

Answer 4

You could split the pdf in two parts assuming that you can attach two files.... I am not aware of Evernote so I wrote this....