Hello!
Today one of our clients sent through ‘design files’ created on Microsoft Word saved as a PDF. There are multiple PDF’s that they are happy for us to use however the PDF’s are very large files which need to go onto our website.
I’ve pulled the PDF’s into an online file condenser yet they are still very large to be going anywhere near our website.
Whats the solution to this or is there?
I’ve always used Acrobat to squeeze down files, so I’m not familiar with online tools for this. Anyway, depending on what’s in the PDF, they can only be squeezed down so much.
Whether they’re too big is another matter. Website pages need to be small and download as rapidly as possible, but people are generally willing to wait a bit longer for a PDF they’ve decided they need.
Then again, it all depends on how essential the PDFs are to those downloading them. A 25MB PDF is too large to download on a whim onto a smartphone over a 3G connection, but if it’s a necessary piece of some mission-critical endeavor, waiting 15 or 20 seconds for the download onto a desktop computer via broadband might be acceptable, if not ideal.
When I open their files they have their logo EVERYWHERE. I get they are trying to self promote themselves but I don’t want to touch it too much.
I’ll give Acrobat a go - loving what you can do with it now. Thank you for this!
I would make a copy of the PDF and put it in a separate folder. Open that file with Acrobat and extract the pages as separate files (View > Tools > Organize Pages > Open > Extract > Delete Pages After Extracting + Extract Pages as Separate Files), and choose this separate folder as the destination. Then look at the file sizes of each page to narrow down the culprits, and have a conversation with the supplier about ways they might reduce the file size.
In my experience, it tends to either be 1) extremely high resolution photos, 2) layered photoshop or illustrator files… with the layers possibly being set to invisible but containing all sorts of heavy content, 3) vector files with a large number of points, or 4) someone embedded large multipage pdfs in your pdf when they only intended to embed one page from their pdf.
You need to understand what are the reasons for a file weight. You can probably analyze the file and see what is the best action.
Let me name a few elements and explain a bit about the variables, and some method to evaluate them.
I. Is the text, really text?
On a long file, this is probably the most important element. Using PDF adobe reader, and if when using the marker or select tool, you are able to actually select the text, the test is passed. You have text.
But sometimes the text is just a “photo of a text” (see point II) and sometimes is what we called curves. They are the shape of letters, but each is an independent figure. They take more space than real text and can not be compressed.
If the text is made of curves, the only way to fix it is by having the original document and generate a new PDF without this text-2-curves conversion.
II. The images.
In some cases, this is the easier part to compress, and is the main target with “compression” software. If the images are high resolution they can be resampled, and if they are not compressed they could be, using a jpg algorithm.
But if the document is mainly images, for example, a bunch of scanned documents, the “quality” could be reduced, of course depending on what is the objective of the images, for example, if they are meant to be for high-quality print.
They could be also in CMYK mode, with compresses less efficient than RGB color mode.
If you can control the compression and resampling try different combinations, for example, assigning 100PPI instead of 300PPI or adding some more Jpg compresion value. Convert the images to RGB if needed.