Useful tip, thanks. ... But does anyone know what happened to the saved 10 MB? ... There must be some significant differences between the two files.

glorious

Yeah... I think you're looking for "voilà".

Nicole Marie

"viola"?

lausley

Does this have OCR feature?

Ken

@Ken:

The OCR (or selectable text) is only available if you print to PDFCreator from the native application, like Word, for example.

Where this tip comes in handy is if someone scanned a document where the entire PDF is a series of images, and they are scanned at a high-color depth.

@glorious:

I'm assuming that the difference is in the color compression in the outputted file vs. the original. Much like the difference between a TIFF (a default scanning format) vs. JPEG.

maximillianx

Yeah, this is precisely what I love PDFCreator for: It has some of the smallest PDF footprints of any PDF freeware printer out there. It makes a huge difference, especially when you're talking about scanned textbooks. No OCR that way (when printed with XP's in-built photo printer), but that's fine with me.

When you can hold a 930-page B&W PDF in 60mb at 300DPI using only freeware, there's very little to complain about.

kureshii

Any program like this for OSX? Thanks for any pointers :-)

funkright

I'm trying to convert images (or the entire document, it's the same) in a pdf to cmyk, with no success.
I've tried to set the pdf format to cmyk in pdfcreator options, but it seems useless, although it's advertised as working (in theory).
Does anybody know the right option, if present, or maybe another tool capable to offer this functionality?

teddyfresco

While not free, the professional Adobe has a function to "reduce file size" that is very effective at reducing the size of PDF files, especially color scans. For instance, a 400dpi scan of a 1 pg. color document can come in at about 1.4MB, Adobe can reduce to about 130kb without losing any definition. I think it has to do with the way PDFs are built (multiple layers, etc.) -- Adobe basically "flattens" it out.

bgwynne

Doesn't work for me. I tried a few different PDFs and the PDF that gets created is blank with "Error: Undefined"

mesostinky

FUNKRIGHT: I agree! An OSX version would be appreciated.

javaman1960

could you guys please tag posts like this with a Windows tag next time?

butterscotch66

I think that for simple PDF generation, I'll stick with Primo, which is a piece of cake to use. But it's good to know that if I need to do more advanced tasks, there's always PDFCreator.

Regarding portability: If you can't go portable, then the next best thing might be going with an online offering. This is also a great option for those who work at places where you cannot install software and your caveman-mentality headquarters doesn't know that anything outside of Microcrap exists. (No way here at work to create PDFs with what we are allowed to use.)

For the online version of PrimoPDF, check out [online.primopdf.com]

genghis_schmengis

I've got a question for everyone, and a little observation that someone may be able to put to great use, I hope (also for my own selfish reasons).

But first, my PDF creating experiences:

I have tried PDFCreator, CutePDF, PrimoPDF, and a number of others. I used CutePDF for quite some time with great success, then they "improved it" and I had to stop using it. I never did figure out what the heck was going on, but it just got all complicated.

From comments here at LH, I happily switched to PrimoPDF, and love it, especially after finding that if you poke around in the print driver options, you can tell it how many pages to put on a single output page.

But in the past, at one point, (I don't recall exactly how I did it), I took several scans that I made, and printed them through a fax driver, which as I recall gave me a single multi-page TIFF file. I then opened that file with IrfanView and then "printed" the multi-page file to a PDF file, and due to the compression done by the fax driver, they came out incredibly small. I can't recall exact numbers, but it was significant. The printed files looked like the originals to me.

I've not looked into it recently, but I suspect that someone with a little tiny bit more knowledge than I with fax or TIFF and Windows printer drivers, could rig something up that would make really small PDF files, and with a process that isn't so convoluted as what I did.

I have also used pdf995, also seen recommended here, which has got a lot of features, but is a bit of a nagger. For my purposes, I found that between PrimoPDF and this great program found at www.paologios.com for splitting and/or merging PDF files, it covers 99% of my PDF needs.

One neat thing that I've found, in having to print out magazine articles that have big pictures in them that would otherwise use a lot of toner, and waste a page of paper unnecessarily, or lots of advertisements, the Gios splitter/merger will let you take a file or set of files and specify just the pages you want, and then "merge" it/them into a second file. It is an easy way to select which pages you want to keep.

The Gios program has a few minor bugs, such as crashing if you specify a page number greater than the total number in the input file. I found that out because I knew I wanted it to print to the end of the file, but found that saying pages 1-2,3-5,7-1000 is not the way to get it done. What I did notice after making that mistake is that it does show you the total number of pages, so I guess what I did isn't necessary. The other bug is that if you drag a set of files over, it doesn't seem to want to bring them all over in the original order. I can't recall what makes me say this, but I do believe, just from being a software engineer for 20+ years, that it looks like a bug in the way the files were ordered. But you can rearrange them. It's just a little tedious in how you have to do it. Having said that, it's open source, and very useful as is.

At this point, in looking above at what I've typed, I think that it is more than I know on the subject, so had better stop.

VideoJeff

I am not sure how the compression come about. however, it does not work for all document. some incident does create bigger size file. and I have incident which it bloat up the size from 4MB to 16MB and take me tremendous amount of time for the process to finished.

It does work most of the time so far.

kjloh