The use of the Internet and other digital technologies is necessary for every profession today. It is used for a variety of purposes, but one of the most important is the sharing of electronic documents. And that’s why PDF is the biggest discovery in the field of file format because it’s the best option you can find. Ever since it was created by the famous computer software company Adobe, responsible for Photoshop as well as many other fantastic software, it is by far the most used electronic document format.
You will use it in elementary and high school when you need to send an essay to a professor or read an eBook. Also later for all business needs and so on. There is virtually no situation where you do not need an electronic document. The use of PDF is so widespread that you don’t even need a special app, each browser will open a PDF file. The only problem may be the file size. Since you can convert anything to PDF, then the file size can be very large. So there is something called compression and it solves that problem. However, many worry about whether it will impair file quality and the like. So we’ll tell you what you need to know when compressing PDF files.
What is PDF?
Portable Document Format or PDF is a type of file format, as we have already told you. In addition to not having to use the app itself, the big advantage is that it works the same on all operating systems. No matter how many times you use that file it will always look the same. You can include practically everything in it, primarily text, photos, videos, links and so on. Also, you can protect it by using a password so that no one who doesn’t know the password can view or edit it. I also allow you to digitally sign documents, which is very important, because in that way users will not change the content.
PDF compression
What is the primary topic of this article are the things you need to know when compressing PDF files. And what exactly is compression? It is a special process, which aims to reduce the size of the file without compromising its quality in any way. There are various ways in which compression is achieved, primarily by removing data that is repeated many times.
The process itself is not of great importance to you, because you will certainly not do it, but there are tools that will do it for you. More and more PDF compressors are completely online, such as AnyPDF, so you will be able to easily and quickly reduce PDF file size without losing quality and to do that online. There is no need to download app or something similar. Such tools usually offer you several other options besides compression. So you can merge, resize, rotate, crop and perform many other actions with a PDF file.
Things to know
1. You choose whether you want to compress the entire file
It is up to you to decide whether you want to compress each part of the file or, for example, leave the images in their original resolution. Images certainly take up the most space, so you will achieve great space savings by compression. However, if you want everything to be in high resolution, then choose the option so that the images are not compressed. You need to find the right balance between size and quality, so to get a file that takes up little space, but not to compromise quality. Think what you will do with that file. If you will take it with your on external hard disc, you can leave images in original size. On the other hand, if you have to send in using email, you must adjust size of the file to fit.
2. Further increase in security
As we have already said, it is possible to set a password for a PDF file so that not everyone can edit it or even read it. You will do this by finding the “Encrypt with Password” option in the tools section when you open Adobe Acrobat and there you will set password want. However, you can further secure it by inserting another level of encryption when you compress it. This way you will have a double layer of protection and you will also be able to choose which parts to encrypt. You can choose same or different password.
3. You will achieve fast download and upload speed
This is a very logical advantage of compressing PDF files. If you have fast internet, then the download will definitely be very fast, but in some situations when you rely on slower internet, then this is very important. The same goes when you need to upload a file and send it. Upload is even slower than download. When you significantly reduce it, you will notice that both download and upload are significantly faster. This is especially noticeable when we talk about files that have a thousand pages or a lot of images, videos and so on. Or for example at a time when you need to download or upload dozens of PDFs. Then the significant difference will be whether you need a minute or five minutes per PDF. The difference can be even bigger, because it is possible to compress the PDF to only 10 percent of the original size.
4. It is important that you do this because of your hard disk
When you overload your hard drive, you may lose some data, which you certainly do not want. When you buy a hard drive and see that it has, for example, 500 gigabytes or 1 terabyte of memory, you think you will never be able to occupy all that memory. But after a few years of intensive use, there may be no room for a single PDF because you already have a thousand. So you don’t have to buy new one, compression is a simple and quick solution.
Conclusion:
Also, if you pay for the cloud service, you will be able to store more PDFs on the cloud. However, keep in mind that compression must bring certain reduction in the quality of the images, although the reduction in quality is less and less as the tools progress.