Compressing PDF

[pjaj]

One simple if unexpected way of reducing the size of a PDF is to open it in Adobe Acrobat and print it to a new pdf file. This will often reduce an 80kb pdf to 11kb. However, since installing W10 my copy of Acrobat CS4 won't run, and there's no way I can afford to pay and pay and pay Adobe for the latest version for the little work I do with PDFs.
Does anyone know a cheap / free piece of software that can achieve similar results?
Soda PDF gets to about 20-30kb and all of the other freebies I've tried either don't work or only give minimal file reduction.

 

[Ian]

Are there any options to strip metadata, thumbnails, etc... when saving the file in Soda? I don't use that app myself, but I guess when you use a "print to PDF" feature and notice a reduction, you'll be stripping a lot of additional metadata out of the file.

Out of interest, what happens if you use the Microsoft "Print to PDF" printer to do the same as you did in Adobe Acrobat?

 

[pjaj]

I've just run an experiment using all the virtual PDF printers I have
First I loaded the original (generated by an accounts application) into Acrobat Reader, then clicked on "Print"

Original PDF 83KB
MS "Print to PDF" 75KB
MS Word 58KB (1)
novaPDF printer 38KB (2)
SodaPDF printer 80KB (3)
Adobe PDF 15KB (4)

(1) Use SodaPdf to generate 15KB doc file from original, then print to PDF from inside Word
(2) Driver came with Family Tree Maker and watermarks pdf with note that it is printed from an unlicensed application. Best of the rest, but useless with added watermark.
(3) PDF formatting is corrupted
(4) Previous result for a very similar file when Adobe PDF printer was working. Can be as low as 11KB on slightly simpler invoices.

Now for some online tools

pdfcompress.com 61Kb
docpub.com 80KB
compress-pdf.co.uk 58KB
Other online tools all seem to use the same engines, either achieving very little or about 60KB +/- 2KB

So, as you can see, nothing comes close to Adobe PDF and the rest aren't really worth the effort.

 

[Ian]

Thanks for that comprehensive test - that's useful to know.

What prevents Acrobat CS4 running on your machine? Does compatibility mode do anything to help it work? I run some CS3 apps and they work OK with a bit of tweaking, so perhaps you can get AA working after all.

 

[pjaj]

I'm not sure what the problem is. When I upgraded from W7 to W10 it still worked. However there were other problems such as W10 very slow startup and shutdown times and finally the C: drive started giving errors. So I bought a new SSD and did a clean reinstall of W10 and all my applications including the old CS4 Adobe suite.
Some parts of it still continue to work fine, such as Photoshop, but when I try to use Acrobat or the associated virtual PDF printer I get a message that it needs to be "activated by opening another member of the suite such as Photoshop". This process fails, it doesn't get activated and just closes.
I may try the uninstall / reinstall route, but haven't yet.

As for compatibility modes, I've just tried it in Vista (ugh! but suggested by W10), W7 and as administrator but to no avail

 

[Ian]

It may be worth trying the license repair tool listed as step 1 at the link below:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-licensing-stopped-windows.html

It's just a guess, but the license repair tool may be able to activate the Acrobat component - worth a shot anyway .

 

[pjaj]

I've also looked for cheaper alternatives to Acrobat. At first I used Soda PDF Desktop, but once the introductory price period had expired, the annual charge all but tripled to make it uneconomic for the amount of use I have.
Then I found PDF-XChange Editor by Tracker Software which does everything I want at a reasonable price.
Builds PDFs from Most sources including Word, import from Scanner, JPEGs etc etc. Converts Office to and from PDF. Optimise PDF Edit PDF and so on.
One thing I found it did exceptionally well was to convert XPS to PDF very efficiently. For example, the invoice files generated by my accounts software in pdf format were typically 83Kb. "printing" them to XPS gives a file of 195Kb, but importing this into PDF-XChange Editor gives a pdf of under 11Kb, the smallest I've ever seen. So result!

 

[pjaj]

It may be worth trying the license repair tool listed as step 1 at the link below:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-licensing-stopped-windows.html

It's just a guess, but the license repair tool may be able to activate the Acrobat component - worth a shot anyway .

Sorry I didn't reply at the time, sadly the repair tool didn't work.