PDF files or Portable Document Format files are some of the most commonly used files today. Today’s downloadable files such as Instructions, printable form, or even your train/plane ticket comes in PDF format. Any file ending with .pdf is a PDF file.
However, PDF files can sometimes be large in size. A PDF document made up of images and text is larger than a text-only document. Thus it is difficult to share such files or to upload them to the PDF size limit websites.
How to reduce PDF file size
The size of a PDF file varies on the basis of its contents. A document consisting of text is smaller in comparison to text and image documents. Moreover, a PDF file size cannot be reduced below a certain level. Compressing the size of a PDF file requires certain tools. Here in this guide, we are going to show you how to reduce the size of a PDF file in 3 different ways.
1. The easiest and fastest way- Using online PDF tools
Online PDF tools are by far one of the easiest and fastest ways to compress. It is easy to use and very user-friendly. For those of you who want a fast compression or you are on the go-to-go compression, we recommend using this way. What you need to do is the following 3 simple steps.
- Search and open a PDF compressor website from Google search.
- Upload the PDF file and select the compression type(if any).
- Start compression and download the compressed file.
Below we have listed some of the easiest and efficient websites to help to reduce a PDF file size.
Smallpdf Online PDF Tool
Smallpdf.com is an online PDF editing tool. It’s easy to use and user-friendly. To compress the file you just need to select and upload the PDF document, wait for the compression to work, and download the compressed file.
This online tool can compress large PDFs while maintaining both file format and quality. Quality retention is a guarantee. The file reducer tool works on large PDF documents by scanning each file, identifying similar data patterns, and replacing all the duplicates with a unique identifier. Each of these identifiers is much smaller in comparison to the original content of the PDF, and thus, the size is considerably smaller.
Key Features-
- Easy to use and understand.
- Secure Cloud storage.
- Privacy guaranteed.
- Fast compression speed.
- No registration required.
PDF Compressor
PDF Compressor from pdfcompressor.com will automatically compress the PDF file online. Unlike other online PDF editing websites, it provides compression of multiple PDF files counting up to 20.
Key Features –
- Allows multiple PDF files to be compressed simultaneously.
- Simple user interface.
PDFaid PDF Compressor
PDF Compressor from PDFaid.com is an advanced compression tool compared to other websites due to the detailed settings and modification selections.Pdf compressor gives you the freedom to choose these options like image quality that you can fine-tune to balance the quality and file size of the pdf document. Additional options are also available which you can enable or disable depending on the need.
Key Features –
- Quality retention.
- Extensive image scaling options.
Offline PDF Compressing Software
Online PDF compression websites are useful if you have a small number of PDF files with a small size. Moreover, multiple compression service is also not available. For this situation, offline software is recommended. This software doesn’t need internet connectivity and allows multiple compression. Additional compression settings are also available as compared to the online tools with basic compression algorithms. just a one-time installation is required and you are ready to compress your PDF files.
We recommend some of the software that is available on the internet.
- APowerCompressor.
- Neevia PDFcompress
- PDF Compressor
Reducing PDF file size manually.
The size of a PDF file depends on the type of content. For example, a document consisting of high-resolution and large-sized images can be unusually large. Thus if any of the above two methods of compression does not meet your standards, you can try the manual way of PDF compression.
Actually, it is quite easy to manually reduce the size of a PDF file provided that you have the raw document. Below are the steps to manually reduce a PDF file size.
Step 1- First of all you have to extract non-text attachments such as images, videos, or high-graphics media files from the raw document.
Step 2- Upload your images to an online image compressor. We recommend TinyJPG or TinyPNG for good results.
Step 3- Thereafter compress the files and download them.
Step 4- Now replace all the original images with the compressed ones.
Step 5- Lastly rearrange the raw document and convert it into a PDF file.
By following the manual method the file can be compressed within the range of 30-50% depending on how you compress the contents of the file. Also, you can combine the manual method with the other two online and offline methods.
Conclusion-
The large size of PDF files can be quite strenuous to work with. Nowadays most websites limit the size of files to be uploaded due to limited and expensive cloud storage options. If you don’t want to compromise on the quality of the contents of the file, we recommend the manual approach.
If you are quite in a hurry and you don’t want to engage in the complex steps of compression then you can surely try the SmallPDF or PDF compressor to reduce the PDF file size online.
If the number of files is quite a lot, we recommend you to use PDF compressor software. The above-mentioned 3 ways of compression will certainly help you to compress a PDF file efficiently. Depending on the varied quality of the 3 types of compression, you might need to experiment on your own and figure out the best compression method that works for you.
