A PDF is a great way to store, print and share documents. However, if you try to open a large PDF file on your computer, it will take forever. Fortunately, there are ways to compress a pdf file that make it much smaller so that you can open it in seconds rather than minutes or hours.
Smallpdf
If you have a large PDF file and would like to compress it, SmallPDF is one of the best options available. This tool is free online and can be used with any type of PDF file. The process is simple:
- Upload your document by clicking on the “Choose file” button in the top left corner
- Choose whether or not you want to convert images into vector graphics (this will help speed up compression)
- Click “Compress Now”
Adobe Acrobat
As per the experts at Adobe Acrobat, “Adobe Acrobat Pro (or the free version, Adobe Reader) can be downloaded from Adobe’s website.” In Acrobat, find the file you want to compress and open it.
Select File from the menu at the left. Then select Compress. A new window will open where you can pick how much compression you want: choose Standard, Optimized or Maximized (the latter two options are only available in Pro).
Preview
Preview is a free PDF compressor app that comes with Mac OS X. It can also be used to compress PDF files or to convert PDFs into other formats, such as images or text documents (without any loss of quality).
If you haven’t installed Preview yet, go ahead and do that now. Once it’s installed, open up your PDF file in it by clicking the Open button on the toolbar. Then hit Command-E (or File > Export) to bring up the dropdown menu.
From here, you can choose between different kinds of export options:
- Image – This option will reduce your document down to an image file at its current size; if you have multiple pages in your document, then each page will get its own image file saved out with a name like “Page 1” followed by whatever else might be in the title bar above it (for example “Page 1 – Text Document”).
- Spreadsheet – This option converts all text into Excel spreadsheet cells so all text will appear as numbers rather than words when viewing them in Excel or Numbers instead of WordPad; again, though, if there are multiple pages, then each one will become its own worksheet within an entirely new Excel workbook which may make working with these documents difficult since they won’t automatically link together as normal spreadsheets do and they’re much harder to navigate through because they’re not grouped together like they would be otherwise unless maybe we could somehow find some way around this problem?”
Compressing a large PDF file can be tricky, but we hope this article has given you some insight into how to do so.
