PDF Toolkit – PDF Optimizer

Businesses talk about the benefits from reducing the amount of paper they work with: it is a more sustainable business practice, it reduces waste and it saves money that you would spend on paper and printing costs.

Yet the real benefit that most businesses see when they rely less on paper documents comes from the fact that most business is done from different locations. Creating documents with PDF software and storing them on the company wide network allows employees from any location the ability to access them.

The drawback to storing document files electronically is file size. Electronic documents that are rich with images, diagrams, charts and multimedia files take up space. Not only does storage become an issue but also sending large files over the network can result in bandwidth issues.

The solution to this problem is to optimize these documents with PDF software. This allows you eliminate any unnecessary components so that you can better compress files for storage and archiving. If you haven’t optimized PDFs, there’s a good chance that your organization has thousands of documents, which can require a lot of time and effort to optimize with risk of errors—unless of course, you can automate the process. That’s exactly where PDF Optimizer comes in.

Automation with PDF Toolkit

Included in Foxit’s PDF Toolkit, the PDF Optimizer reduces the file size of PDF documents by:

• Down sampling or compressing images
• Un-embedding fonts
• Discarding JavaScript actions; objects or user data; invalid bookmarks and links; external cross references; embedded page thumbnails; and embedded print settings
• Removing all comments, forms and multimedia; document information and metadata; file attachments; and private data from other applications

If you wish, you may also remove form data and flatten form fields if these are no longer important to the finished document.

You’re also presented with clean up options that include using Flate to encode streams that are not encoded and converting LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) encoding to Flate encoding so that data is not removed from the document and the content is not changed to reduce the size of the file.

As with all other Foxit PDF Toolkit modules, the PDF Optimizer allows you to batch process files from a command line interface. Support exists for both single file and single folder processes and you have the ability to work with wildcard characters such as *.pdf for faster processing.

Since large files aren’t efficient for exchanging or transferring electronic documents or for document archiving, it makes sense to save space if you’ve got a large number of PDF files. You just need a way to easily optimize your existing document library to make it more manageable and effective without losing the quality of the files. That’s what PDF Toolkit – PDF Optimizer is all about so give it a try to see just how easy it is to optimize all of your company’s PDF documents.