scan
my class notes and handouts, and transfer some e-textbooks so I can
view them on my Kindle to save myself carrying too much in my backpack.
This is something that
Calibre
could help convert easily to ebook reader-friendly formats, but the
resulting PDF files are often huge, have several pages and thus, take
sometime to load and smoothly display things. This is especially true
for my Logic textbook, which is about 180MB.
So in my desperate search for ways to optimize PDF files, I’ve found
that there aren’t many free options. Although there are a lot of
shareware programs, there are also, thankfully, a few free programs can
help you reduce a PDF file size.
If you don’t have
Irfanview, you should really consider downloading it. It’s a
much better and lightning fast alternative to the default image viewer in Windows,
supports countless plugins that allow it to be extremely versatile, and
converts images to different file types. You can use it to
add borders and
watermarks to your photos, and
batch process many images at a time. You can also view PDF files, provided you download
GhostScript first.
Once you have Ghostscript installed, you can use Irfanview (
portable version
will work as well) to view PDF files and save them as new files. You’ll
get a box on the right of the Save As dialog to choose compression
levels.
You can choose to save with lossless, best, high, medium, and ‘dump’
quality. In my tests, Irfanview reduced a 14MB PDF file to 8MB using the
high-quality setting in Compression, while the lossless and best
quality settings produced files bigger than the original size.
PrimoPDF is a desktop application that allows you to create PDF files from image files and documents.
It installs itself as a virtual printer, which makes optimizing PDF
files a matter of opening the files and printing them with PrimoPDF,
though you can also drag and drop documents to the PrimoPDF desktop
shortcut. From there, you’ll get a dialog box, where you can choose the
document quality.
For the smallest file size, choose the
Screen setting. Pressing
Create PDF starts the conversion.
This program is now shareware but the link provided leads to the last
freeware version. It is pretty much just an executable that does a
decent job at reducing PDF file sizes. In my tests, this program managed
to reduce a 50MB PDF file to 45MB, with the maximum compression level,
at an impressive speed (almost instant conversion).
PDFCompress is a simple web app that takes any PDF files smaller than
5MB and compresses them according to the presets you chose (low,
medium, high and maximum). Maximum compression means the quality will be
approximately a 10 in a scale of 100. In my test with a 3MB file and
maximum compression, the optimized file was about 9% smaller, with no
visible quality loss.
I should also mention PDF ReDirect which is another Windows-only PDF
printer that lets you optimize and rotate PDF files, which we previously
reviewed
here.
What free software do you use to reduce PDF file size? Let us know in the comments!
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-ways-reduce-size-pdf-file/
