The most powerful PDF optimization tool on the market today just got faster and more powerful. PDF Optimizer 1.7.0 is now available with dramatic improvements. Whether you’re a current customer or in the market for an easily-scriptable command-line tool for optimizing PDFs (available for Windows and Linux), read on to discover how this new release can help you.

FLEXIBLE

What does optimization mean? It can mean different things, depending on the end goals for your documents. For many, it simply means reducing file size, for others it means streamlining a PDF to print faster, and for others it can mean reducing size first and then converting to PDF/A for long-term storage. We understand that users have different objectives for their documents, so we designed PDF Optimizer to be flexible. With our latest release, we now include six different template profiles with settings attuned to different optimization goals:

Standard
Mobile
Maximum
Lossless
Archival
Printing

Standard is the recommended profile for documents to be optimized without a specific use case in mind. This is suitable when you’re mainly interested in smaller file sizes and faster viewing, downloading, and processing. It includes a balance of compressing images and removing content without being overly aggressive. This is a great default option for most users.

Mobile is the recommended profile for documents to be used on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. For PDF documents destined for viewing on mobile, some important factors are critical. You can afford to downsample both color and grayscale images more aggressively because of the smaller form factor of mobile devices used, but you can still maintain good quality compression so as to not introduce artifacting. You want to optimize your documents’ content for faster loading on devices with limited battery life and processing resources.

Maximum is designed to reduce file size by as much as possible. This means preserving the original quality of the output, particularly with images, is not an option available in this setting. In many cases, you need to think critically about quality, but in some workflows, users may prefer to sacrifice quality for the smallest possible files. This can also be used to test the limits of file size reduction while fine-tuning your own ideal optimization settings.

Lossless is designed to compress the PDF as much as possible while preserving the visual quality of the output. This means that only lossless image compression is used and that images are not downsampled. For some users, reducing size of the output is equally as critical as preserving visual quality. This is often a good choice for people in the legal or medical space, where reducing file size is key but maintaining visual integrity is minimum requirement.

Archival is designed to produce an archived version of the document for long-term storage using the PDF/A-3b format. Moderate image compression and downsampling are employed, and many removal options are disabled. For many users in the legal or government space, adoption of the PDF/A standard versus simply using regular PDFs has quickly becoming a requirement, which means that you should work to achieve the best output possible before converting your documents for long-term storage.

Printing is designed to produce an optimal version of documents to be sent to physical printers. Minimal compression and downsampling are applied so as to maintain visual quality. All font options are enabled, transparency is flattened, content that has no impact on printing is discarded to improve printing processing time, and colors are converted to CMYK for best results. This is a great choice for those in publishing, where it’s important for documents to print as fast as possible.

These new profiles provide guidelines and options and are tailored to meet your different optimization goals. You can also easily craft your own custom profile with settings attuned to your specific requirements.

FASTER

One of our customers recently presented us with a very large, complex PDF that was over 1GB in size. Processing time for optimizing this file could be measured in weeks (yes, weeks!). Not only did the document have thousands of pages, but it had millions of images scattered throughout it as well. PDF Optimizer can process complex documents, but this particular file presented an extreme performance challenge. Fortunately, our Engineering team was up for that challenge.

Through dedicated effort and persistence, we found the bottlenecks in performance, and we were able to reduce the processing time down to only 20 minutes! From weeks to 20 minutes - talk about a dramatic improvement! The best part of this improvement to PDF Optimizer is that for general use cases, overall processing speed for most PDF documents (which are much less complex documents) is now significantly faster.

MORE POWERFUL

We’ve introduced extended PDF/A support in PDF Optimizer, allowing you to select Part 2 and Part 3 documents that comply with Level B or Level U conformance (PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u, PDF/A-3b, and PDF/A-3u).

We’ve added 3 new options to:

Preserve the original PDF version of the source document when generating an output PDF file
Remove the output intent from a PDF document to reduce file size
Remove XMP padding from metadata content to reduce file size

Also included with this update are a whole host of other improvements and bug fixes courtesy of the Adobe PDF Library, which is the driving force behind PDF Optimizer.

We invite you to download and evaluate PDF Optimizer today to discover how it can work for you and your PDF needs. We are also excited to announce that our free PDF Checker tool now includes access to a free evaluation download of PDF Optimizer as well. PDF Checker provides a detailed report for PDF files, specifying conditions that PDF Optimizer can address.