OT: pdf

[vqdriver]

i send/receive pdfs a lot and have a question.
i only have acrobat reader so in order to trim pages to a select few, i've been 'printing' to 'microsoft print to pdf'. let's say i receive a pdf of a document 100 pages long and 5mb in size, and i want to trim it down to a select 80ish pages, i can specify which pages to 'print' and i can get a new pdf with only those pages, seemingly the same quality as the original. but in doing so the file in question would go from 5mb in size to 6mb. eh??

i've always assumed the full version of acrobat used better compression. if so, it could be worth just buying, but i've had horrible luck with adobe bloatware

[fa63]

Try Foxit PhantomPDF

[JAGI410]

Bluebeam Revu Standard would fit the bill as well. Not free, but way better than Adobe.

[EDS]

Nuance Power PDF is an alternative to adobe.

[donevwil]

I've not been a fan of Adobe for ages, many much better free packages out there.

At work I use (free) PDF-XChange viewer and (free) CutePDF writer as my printer driver. PDF-XChange's driver was buggy when originally installed years ago and Cute-PDF has been rock solid and very configurable. PDF-XChange viewer has tons of editing and redlining power (for a free software).

[PQJ]

Re: "free" -- if the docs in question are proprietary, confidential or 'sensitive' in any way, I would be leery of "free" services. In my experience, there are few things in life that are truly "free." And also -- if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

[palincss]

To extract pages from a PDF, I use pdfmod or pdftk. This article lists a number of others that can do the same job.

[ultraman6970]

VQdriver... if you have the documents in word for example you can use openoffice and when exporting to pdf you tell it how much quality you want to add to the pdf, the less quality the smaller the file.

Going from pdf file to pdf never tried it in openoffice and now im curious if i can but probably you can do copy and paste from app to app and then export and select quality at the time of saving ?

ps: alternative to? interesting website.

[rnhood]

Originally Posted by palincss

To extract pages from a PDF, I use pdfmod or pdftk. This article lists a number of others that can do the same job.

Yes, interesting site. Thx for posting.

[vqdriver]

Thanks guys. I'll look into those options.
FWIW, I'm fine with paying for software but Adobe in particular always seems to drag on my system

[Bud_E]

I believe OpenOffice has a reasonable pdf editor.

[Vientomas]

Check dis: https://smallpdf.com/

[redir]

I don't think you can just buy Adobe Professional anymore. You have to opt in to their SAS which costs something like $600/year. I hate Adobe now that they went to this model. I mean sure you have access to like 50 software programs but all I ever use is 3 and I can do jsut about everything in Photoshop CC that I used to do in Photoshop 6 which was a one time purchase 10 years ago. My work pays for is so what ever... but still.

My guess is to why it bumps up to 1MB is if there are any images in the PDF they might be compressed differently and or maybe at 5MB you were really closer to 5.9MB and in 'printing' to another PDF it carried over some information that pushed it to 6.

[Tony T]

I use a Mac (Just drag the page(s) to the desktop with Preview. To reduce Size, I run it through a Quartz Filter)