Best way to compress???

[DontFeedPhil]

Hey guys,
I usually come here with my computer/misc questions cause I know theres always a bunch of people in here that know what they are talking about...
My latest problem is that i have a pdf file that is about 190 mb in size. I want to upload it to my godaddy website and apparently there is a 30 mb size limit.
Well I do have winrar. But I must be doing something wrong when it comes to compressing the file cause it only goes down to 189 mb.
How can I compress that file...

 

[Canadave]

190 MB down to 30? I'm not an expert, but I honestly don't think that's possible without some serious data loss.

 

[ed629]

The problem lies in the PDF itself, they're generally set and made to be compressed as much as possible in their structure. In essence, it's like trying to zip a *.zip file.

 

[Small White Car]

190 MB down to 30? I'm not an expert, but I honestly don't think that's possible without some serious data loss.

There's no way for you to know that without examining the file.

They're generally set and made to be compressed as much as possible in their structure.

Yes, but what if he needs it to look good on a 1000 pixel-width LCD screen and it's a 5000 pixel-width print document? There's certainly some room to be saved there.

I mean, I don't know anything about this file, but like I said, there's no way for any of us to know just from guessing.

Edit: To the OP - sorry, I'm not ignoring you, but I can't help. I have Adobe Acrobat Pro and I sometimes use plain old OSX since it's built right into my computer and is faster to use.

If you don't have either one of those things, I don't know much about other programs.

 

[Canadave]

190 MB down to 30? I'm not an expert, but I honestly don't think that's possible without some serious data loss.

There's no way for you to know that without examining the file.

See: "I'm no expert".

 

[DontFeedPhil]

Well I do have OS X. the pdf is a bunch of scanned images of a out of print users manual for a reel to reel machine...
I guess i never realized that godaddy would have such a small limit on uploading files. I mean what if i recorded a song and mixed it and made it into a mp3? I doubt it would be 30mb or less.
I asked them if I used the hosted version of their service would I be able to upload larger files and they said it depended on wheather i had an ftp transfer program that could do it. I just dont understand if I have say 4000 mb of disk space for my site why I cant upload any sized files as long as i dont go over my total limit?

 

[Jadzia]

winrar will compress where compression is possible. Only in very rare circumstances will it fail. But remember that it is lossless compression. So given that there is negligible compression with winrar, you can assume there are negligible opportunities for lossless compression in this file, and you will need to look again at the content.

190MB sounds realistic for about 40 jpeg images at average camera resolutions. Is that what you have?

1. You will have to reduce the resolution of images accordingly. Batch resampling them all to 35% of whatever size they are now should give you an acceptable pdf size of under 30MB in total.

2. Also consider converting the images to greyscale first if they are black and white. You will make space savings from that action alone, and might be able to keep under the limit with resize of 45-50%, so preserving more detail in the images.

 

[backstept]

I don't know how to do it, but winrar can split a file across several smaller archives that will all unzip back into a single original file . . .

 

[cultcross]

What format do you want this presented in? Is it possible to do different pages in different files without harming what you want to do with it? That might be a way around the upload size limit.

 

[B.J.]

If you can't compress it any further and can't get around the upload limit, you could get the compression program to split it up into volumes.

 

[Carpe Occasio]

Don't compress it, reprint it. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat installed. Open the PDF you want to upload and print it using the Adobe PDF printer (it shows up just like a regular printer). This will recreate the PDF at a smaller size (you can either overwrite the original or create a separate document). This works for me about 95% of the time using Adobe Acrobat. If you want a free solution you could try using PDF Creator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/). I've never used it but it could have a similar effect.

 

[Pingfah]

Unless this PDF is an unbelieveably huge print size, I can only imagine that images that are far too high res have been used, and the distiller settings were not set to downsample to 300dpi or lower.

Winrar should do an effective job of adding LZW style lossless compression to the file, but evidently it is already at it's limit for that.

MUST it stay as an PDF? Is ultra crisp text important? If not I would simply rasterise it in photoshop and save the whole thing at the right resolution, as seperate images and with JPG compression. But not if it is multipage and for print, as that will suck.

 

[B.J.]

Here's another question - if what you scanned is a manual, can it be converted to actual text rather than a bunch of images? That would certainly cut the file size down significantly. If it's a mix of text and images, it might not be worth the work to try and convert that.

 

[DontFeedPhil]

Sorry I havent been around...
The problem Im finding is that alot (but not all) of pages do contain at least one illustration or something...
I was thinking about retyping the whole thing out using photoshop to place the text exactly as it should be and possibly retracing the illustrations...Its off a slightly bad scan and I want things sharper.
And the idea about splitting it up would work but I want to keep the file as something you have to come to my site to get. So I dont want to just upload to rapidshare as people will just pass the DL link out and I wont get any DL's