How many times have you created a PDF file, gone to email it and it’s too large to send? Well, we have 5 easy tips to help you reduce your PDF file size. The two biggest things to look at when you want to reduce the size of PDF files are removing objects and downsampling/shrinking the images it contains.

1. Re-create the PDF to reduce PDF file size

A handy trick for reducing PDF file size is to re-create or ‘re-fry’ your PDF. By creating the PDF again you can strip out plenty of unwanted objects, remove tags, and compress images further. You can do this with any tool that supports ‘print to PDF’ functionality. For this trick you can use our free Nitro Reader.

1. Open the PDF file
2. Click File > Print
3. Select Nitro PDF Creator 2 from the list of printers
4. Click the Properties button and select Web-ready Conversion Quality
5. Click OK.

2. Reduce PDF file size with ‘Save As’

If you use a PDF editor such as Nitro Pro you can make use of the ‘Save As’ functionality to trim some fat off your PDF files. Chris Dahl explained it succinctly in a previous post:

PDF files have something that is called incremental updates, where any changes that you make to a document is appended to the end of the file without doing a complete rewrite. This is why the Save feature is much faster than a Save As, and also why PDF files saved this way can be large. The Save As feature will rewrite the entire file and provide you with a smaller file size.

So, to shrink the PDF, do the following:

1. Open the PDF in your PDF editor
2. Click File > Save As

3. Remove unwanted objects

PDF files can contain a bunch of different objects, including bookmarks, links, annotations, form fields, JavaScript, Named Destinations and embedded fonts — all of which can be removed from an existing PDF file. Like tip #2, it requires a PDF editing tool such as Nitro PDF Professional or Adobe Acrobat.

1. Open the PDF in your PDF editor
2. Click File > Optimize PDF > Select the Remove Objects tab
3. Choose the objects to remove
4. Click OK, then Optimize

4. Shrink all images in PDF files

For PDF files that contain many images, downsampling all of them can make a noticeable difference.

1. Open the PDF in Nitro Pro
2. Click File > OptimizePDF.
3. Pick from one of the 5 preset image quality options or select Custom for further downsample choices
4. Click OK, then Optimize

5. Reduce your PDF using magical fairy dust

We don’t think this one is real but some other PDF developers might. If you really want the easiest way and most options to reduce PDF files, Nitro Pro will automatically attempt to reduce your documents. You can download a free 14-day trial with the full functionality at www.nitropdf.com/try.

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