Knowing how to compress a PDF file is useful in many ways. Mainly because it’s one of the most widely used formats for sharing documents, and having a very heavy file can complicate matters.
Company staff should be trained to know how to compress a PDF file, as this will help you share files with colleagues or a list of customers more quickly and easily.
In this article, we’ll share with you the best ways to take weight off a PDF, from how to compress a file with the programs you already have installed on your PC to how to compress a PDF file to Zip or Rar. By the time you’ve finished reading this post, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to compress PDF files with any of the existing options.
1. Using a PDF reader
Most people looking for information on how to compress a PDF file don’t know that they can do it without having to download programs or choose from the thousands of pages for compressing PDF files that exist. Interestingly, the solution to taking weight out of a PDF is so simple that many ignore it, and it becomes more complicated than necessary.
The truth is that the only thing you need to do to compress a PDF file is to use the document size optimization options that most PDF readers have. If you use programs like Adobe Acrobat Reader, Foxit PhantomPDF, or PDF Element, you’ll have no problem compressing a PDF file with just a few clicks and absolutely nothing to download.
This option is also ideal if you have Internet connection problems and need to compress PDF documents. Here are the steps you need to follow to achieve this:
- Open the document you wish to optimize in the PDF reader.
- Click on the file and select the “Optimize PDF” option. Depending on the program, the option to optimize the PDF may be found in the tools tab.
- Select the parameters for compressing a PDF file. You can modify image resolution, source weight, and final document quality.
- Choose the folder in which you wish to save the file, and enter the name you wish to give the document. We recommend that you keep the original document in case you make a mistake during the procedure.
In some programs, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can choose to compress a PDF file as standard with a single click, or customize it with the advanced optimization option. The only difference is that if you configure all the settings to your liking, the results will probably be better, even if you’re compressing a very large PDF file.
2. Using Microsoft Word
This trick for compressing a PDF file is poorly understood, especially as people have stopped using Office programs and like to work with Google Docs formats. However, from now on, you’ll be leaving electronic formats behind and starting to use Word again.
At this point, we’ll explain how to compress a PDF file so that it weighs less using nothing more than Microsoft Word.
- The first thing you’ll need to do is open the PDF file in Word and convert it into an editable document. If this is the first time you’ve used Word to compress a PDF file, a text window will appear with a warning about the quality of the results when converting a PDF into Word.
- After clicking on accept automatically, the PDF file will become a Word document that you can edit. If it has a “protected view” format, simply click on “enable editing” so that you can adjust all the necessary details.
- The next step for compressing a PDF file with Word is to click file > export > create PDF / XPS document.
- Now all you have to do is choose the location where the file will be saved, write the name, and select the minimum size save option. You can also open the options panel if, in addition to compressing a PDF, you wish to delete certain pages from the document or encrypt the file with a key.
Compressing a PDF file with Word is very simple. Best of all, you can shrink a PDF by at least 70 percent. In other words, if your PDF weighed 10mb, you could reduce its weight to 3mb. We recommend you bear in mind that this option can considerably reduce the quality of your PDF, and is not recommended for use with very heavy files, especially if your computer is very slow.
The heaviest files are usually PDF files that have been constructed from scanned or photo images, and compressing them can sometimes reduce their quality to the point where readability is also lost. What’s more, Word doesn’t have any functions that allow you to turn an image into text, which makes it very inefficient in these cases.
3. Using ABBYY FineReader
Compressing PDF documents isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to scanned documents. And we don’t particularly want a letter of recommendation or any other office document, because generally, because they’re short documents, they don’t weigh much. This method of compressing a PDF file is particularly useful when we want to take a PDF of a book we’re downloading.
Either because we have a lot of books and want to free up space on the computer, or because we need to send one by post and because of its weight, we can’t use optical character recognition software is the best method for compressing a PDF file with scanner images.
The best software for this is ABBYY FineReader. The program will help you recognize the characters in any image, create a Word document with all the text in the book or document, and convert it to PDF.
Here are the steps to follow to compress a PDF file with ABBYY FineReader:
- Open the document you want to compress with ABBYY FineReader.
- In the tools tab, select the “Convert to Microsoft Word” option.
- Choose the editable format and language of your choice, and click on the blue button to convert to Word.
- Check that the text has been copied correctly, and make any necessary changes.
- Click on Save and choose the folder where the file will be saved.
- Follow the steps we outlined when we talked about compressing a PDF file with Word, and convert your new document to PDF.
Depending on the quality of the scanned images, the results may vary. and as a result, you’ll have to spend time editing parts that weren’t readable and couldn’t be transcribed. However, if you learn how to use this program, you can safely say that you know how to compress a PDF file to the maximum.
4. Using online tools
If you want to know how to compress a PDF file online, you can also read our recommendations and tips, as we’ll tell you which are the best pages for compressing a PDF file.
If you are guided by the pages that appear when you Google “reduce PDF size” or “compress PDF online”, you may end up on some sites where all there is advertising or they ask you to register to compress a PDF file. Therefore, we suggest you review the following options first:
- Adobe Acrobat Reader online
- Foxit
- iLovePDF
- Smallpdf
All these pages work in the same way: select “reduce PDF size” or load the file you wish to compress and wait a few seconds while the page performs the procedure. Then simply download the compressed file.
5. Using WinRAR or WinZip
Finally, you can also compress a PDF file if you have data compression programs such as WinRAR or WinZip. The advantage of knowing how to compress a PDF file is that documents don’t lose quality, and you can save as many PDF files as you like in the same file.
If you want to learn how to zip a PDF file, just follow these steps:
- Select the PDF file you want to compress and right-click on it.
- Choose the “add to file” option and configure the compression parameters.
- Click on accept and wait for the procedure to take place.
You can easily compress a PDF file into a zip or rar file. To use them later, simply click on the document you’ve created and choose the option to extract the files.
We must warn you that there’s no way of learning how to compress a PDF file smaller than 1mb, as in fact the final weight will be determined by the size of the file. However, you now have the knowledge to use any PDF compressor and reduce the weight of your files as much as possible.
