About Justin VanAlstyne Expertise I have a full working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 - 7.01. I have experience in creating interactive PDFs, embedding multimedia, web-based forms, creating presentations using PDF, advanced prepress preparation, PDF web optimization, color management, and using PDF as a soft-proofing tool. I do not have a lot of experience using Acrobat`s advanced Javascripting features, though a lot of custom functionality can be built into a PDF this way.
Experience
Past/Present clients Marsh, Inc. (http://www.marsh.com), Impel Corp (http://www.impelcorp.com), Home Properties (http://www.homeproperties.com)
Question I am scanning to produce pdf files, but they are very large, like 20-50MB or so. (pdf files created from documents that are already in the computer are smaller.) Is there a way to make a new pdf from the (larger) original pdf? I've been trying but distiller errors are happening. I use a Mac, system 9.2, Adobe Acrobat 5. Thank you.
Answer David-
The reason your scanned PDF documents are so much larger is because all the PDF contains is simply an image of your document. It's basically the same thing as if you were to scan the document into Photoshop or something. It's just a high-resolution image.
A PDF that you create from an original document on your computer is so much smaller because the entire page is not just one big image, it's made up of the embeded font, the vector text, etc.
If this isn't making sense, do a Google search on the words "vector" and "raster" and you will see what I mean.
You cannot PDF a PDF. The one thing you can do is scan your document in as you would a photograph (not directly into Acrobat). Scale the image down to a reasonable size (whatever is appropriate for your use in the PDF) and save it as a JPEG with the compression setting you choose appropriate. Then open Acrobat (with no document open) and go to File>Open. Choose "All filetypes" (or something similar) at the bottom of the Open window. Then select the first page JPEG of your document. Then you can just use the Pages>Insert menu and select all of your JPEG images, and Acrobat will insert them. When you save this PDF, it will be much smaller than the PDF you created before.
