Use PDFCreator to Shrink Scanned Documents

The Confessions of a Freeware Junkie blog points out a second-hand hack that can save document scanners quite a bit of space next time they find themselves with gigantic PDF files. The author, having been handed a gigantic colour PDF file to send along and failing to get much out of a compression utility, simply “printed” the PDF to, well, PDF again using Lifehacker commenter favourite PDFCreator, and, viola—a 13 MB file became 3 MB. A bit of colour definition was lost, but the document was still highly legible. Have any of your own tricks for preventing PDFs that take up entire thumb drives? Feel free to share ‘em in the comments.