Need help compressing some PDF's

Question

not a graphic designer or student or even hobbyist..

I have the full suite of Adobe CC at my disposal

My wife's friend has to submit some documents for some official business / studies. Problem is that to "get" these documents she has to submit some PDF's of her grades to the institute she studied which is in India.

She sent me a bunch of PDF's varying from 400 to 800 kb in size. They were scanned using camscan.

I've tried to reduce the size of the documents using native features in Acrobrat Pro and got the 400 kb pdf to 200

I then tried opening the file in Indesign using the place method and saving it using the highest compression methods available. Even then it didn't change in size from the Acrobat compression.

For now i've asked her friend to scan her documents using a proper scanner and I hope that would help..?

Does anyone have any tips, I was thinking of asking her to send raw pics that I could compress then just turn into PDFs.

The Uni in India only accepts 100kb file size of PDFs and nothing else which seems like madness to me, but heyho.

Yours, DN.

Answer 1

There are multiple ways you can achieve this,

1. If they are from camscan, most likely all are images which are converted to PDF. Best way to reduce size in this case is to reduce sizes of images. Use photoshop to reduce size of images and then make PDF out of them. (you don't even have to ask for raw images, just save them from Adobe acrobat directly)
2. You can do is open it in Adobe acrobat and print them using "acrobat printer" which will create reduced PDF sizes.
3. Open it in Adobe acrobat > tool > optimize PDF > Reduce file size (there are multiple advance options which you can play around)
4. My least favorite option: use some online PDF reduction websites. There are plenty of them. (DO NOT use if your PDF has sensitive content)

Answer 2

Old question, I know.....

Don't "scan" anything

If you have a collection of PDFs, merely use Acrobat to combine the various individual PDFs into a single PDF.

With Acrobat >

File > Create > Combine Files into Single PDF...

The menu location and title may vary slightly based upon Acrobat version. But they all have that option somewhere.

By "scanning" files you are essentially creating one large image and that will always be larger in size (kb) than an original PDF form an application with live type.