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Target:
What do you guys do with these damn things?

PDF's are ubiquitous these days, and with care and consideration they are eminently practical.  Unfortunately the converse is also true, and without that care and consideration the resulting documents can be real PITA

To put this into some context I work with a lot of documents that are sent to us via email in this format.  As they are generally produced by our mutifunction printers there is little or no control over the output (even if the senders had the interest or the knowledge to make the effort).  Net result is that we routinely get high resolution colour documents and the file sizes reflect this, eg the latest example is a 40 page document containing text only (some in tables) that is 10.5M.

We have no requirement for high resolutions or colour, and given that they are almost purely text the final file sizes seem to defy logic.  Apart from Acrobat (not an option in a corporate environment), there seems to be a dearth of solutions that would enable us to tackle these monsters

Plain PDF compressors do not appear to be helpful in this case (often the output is larger than the original)

Likewise reprinting the document to new PDF (using one of the myriad of 'PDF printer drivers') at a lower resolution generally produces a document that is larger than the originals (sometimes significantly) which seems to defy logic (oftimes the output is missing large sections, and/or the some of the text is mangled).

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, so I'd be most interested to hear what others are doing in these circumstances

lanux128:
you can access the MFPs via a browser just like a router and make changes to reduce the dpi or some other settings.

Target:
you can access the MFPs via a browser just like a router and make changes to reduce the dpi or some other settings.
-lanux128 (November 01, 2009, 10:54 PM)
--- End quote ---

I'm aware of this, but I work in a large corporation so these things are profiled and locked down  >:(.

Even if they weren't, there are probably several hundred of these things all over the country and the files we're sent could pretty much come from any of them...

lanux128:
yes, i forgot to add that these settings are normally controlled and not within the end-users' reach. basically you can make a proposal to change the settings but other than that not much can be done on the users' side. re-printing will not do much help since from your description the original is not already not optimized or doesn't conform to the standard pdf specifications. that might explain the bloated size.

JavaJones:
PDF Creator does pretty well at recompressing PDFs. It can be done in batches, works as a "print driver" and stand-alone, lots of config options.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

- Oshyan

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