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TIP 138: Optimizing Your PDF Documents

Some projects are quite involved. You may have had a few rounds of reviewing, and dozens of comments have been applied. You may have received a document from a user less skillful in the construction of source documents and the resolutions of images may be too high for your intended use of the document. You may have embedded a movie in several renditions and then changed your mind and deleted most of them… the list can be almost endless.

You don't have to try to remember all the different elements that can bloat your files' size and then manually clean them up. Instead, use two tools in Acrobat to take care of the problem areas for you. The PDF Optimizer (which you can customize) checks all aspects of a document for unnecessary content, and then removes it. Beware: Optimizing a signed document will invalidate the signature. (Read about signatures in Chapter 18.)

First, analyze the document. Choose Advanced > PDF Optimizer to open the dialog. Click Audit space usage at the upper right of the dialog. Acrobat examines the document and displays a report (Figure 138a). Depending on the type of contents in the document, you see listings for such elements as fonts, comments, and images; each is defined both in percentages of the entire document size and in bytes. Click OK to close the audit report.

The default settings in the PDF Optimizer are for Acrobat 5.0 compatibility. If you click the Make compatible with pull-down arrow and choose another program version, the Preset in the upper left of the dialog changes from Standard to Custom. The options available in the different panes of the dialog vary according to the selected program version.

Click a label in the left column on the dialog to display settings (Figure 138b). As you look through the list, deselect items that you don't want to optimize; look for optimizing in these areas:

• Images
  Define settings for color, grayscale, and monochrome images. Choose compression types, quality, and downsampling values.

• Scanned Pages
  Activate the compression and quality check box and then apply filters to clean up a scan, such as halo removal, descreen, or despeckle. If you choose Adaptive Compression options on this pane of the dialog, the settings on the Images pane are disabled.

• Fonts
  The fonts in the document are listed in the dialog; unembed those you don't need, such as system fonts or common fonts. If a document is intended for departmental circulation, for example, and you know everyone viewing it uses the same set of fonts, you can delete those from the list.

• Transparency
  Choose transparency flattening and settings such as resolutions for text, line art, and gradients.

• Discard Objects
  Decide what objects can be removed from the document, such as layers, form content, cross-references, and comments.

• Clean Up
  Choose other cleanup details, such as removal of invalid links or bookmarks, encoding options, and a method of compressing the document's structure.

Click Save to name and save the settings if you plan to reuse them at a later time. If optimizing is a one-time thing, click OK to close the dialog. The Save Optimized As dialog opens. Click Save to overwrite the original file; to be on the safe side, save the document with another name instead. Once you check the results and are satisfied, delete the original.