How to compress PDF files

Even though PDFs offer a lot of advantages,  particularly when it comes to security and provide a "portable" layout, there are several situations in which the size of this format can be challenging. For example, if we want to send several PDFs by email, their size can quickly become too much to send. This, however, can easily be solved.

Whether you are sending a job application or important business files to colleagues, the number of attachments and their size can often quickly pile up, making it impossible to send. The maximum size of an email's attachment usually lies between 10 and 25 MB, depending on the provider, and even if your provider allows you to send larger files, the recipient’s provider might have stricter limits. In order to avoid issues when it comes to sending and receiving emails that contain several PDFs, you can reduce their size. This can easily be done with a PDF editor like PDF Architect.

If you need to reduce the size of a PDF, you have two options. You can remove content that isn’t needed, e.g., images that are only partially displayed or not at all. Another possibility is to reduce the size of the images by compressing the PDF. PDF Architect gives you several options to compress PDFs and clearly outlines which quality choice best fits your requirements. For print use, it is advisable to reduce the size to medium quality, which means that images in the PDF will be reduced to 600 dpi. For MS Office use, you only need to select low quality with images being reduced to 300 dpi and when it comes to sending PDF files by email the minimum quality with an image size of 150 dpi is recommended. Whichever option you choose, prior to reducing your PDF file, PDF Architect will always estimate the size that your PDF should be compressed to.

So, the next time you find yourself running into a limit when sending a PDF via email, try to reduce the size of the files first rather than reducing the number of attachments. This way you can avoid having to either send your PDF files in several emails or even having to deselect a few important files from your attachments. Additionally, if you want or need to keep the file size, we recommend checking out our article about sending PFDs via Dropbox.

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