Destilling with Adobe Professional
Before optimizing PDF documents
The PDF document that we are going to optimize should be the Editable type. In other words, the fonts are embedded or stored in the PDF document and the text can be selected, searched and treated as text.
Steps to optimize PDF documents
Step 1. Add Adobe PDF Setting
1. In Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, choose Advanced > Print Production > Acrobat Distiller to open Acrobat Distiller. An alternative way to launch Acrobat Distiller is through Start >Programs > Adobe Master Collection CS3 > Acrobat Distiller 8.
2. In Acrobat Distiller, select "Smallest File Size" from Default Settings drop-down list as shown below.
3. Select Settings > Edit Adobe PDF Settings….
4. Click the Save As… button to save this new Adobe PDF Setting File (.joboptions) as another name. For example, save this new Adobe PDF Setting as "PDF FlipBook.joboptions".
5. Under the General tab, set Compatibility to "Acrobat 6.0 (PDF 1.5)" and set Resolution to "150" dots per inch.
6. Select the Images tab. For Color Images and Grayscale Images, set the Image Quality to "Low" (refer to figure below. To have higher quality images while able to tolerate higher file size, set the Image Quality to "Medium".
7. For the Monochrome Images, set the Downsample to 300 pixels per inch. This setting is suitable for contents that have English text. However, if the contents have foreign-language (Chinese, Japanese, German, others) text, under the Monochrome Images section, set the Downsample to 500 pixels per inch (refer to figure below). This will increase the clarity of those foreign text for more comfortable reading.
8. Under the Fonts tab, select the Embed all fonts and Subset embedded fonts check boxes and set the percentage to 100%. If the PDF document contains foreign-language fonts (i.e. Chinese, German, French, Japanese, Korean, etc), the Embed all fonts check box will make sure that those fonts needed to view the document are embedded.
9. Under the Color and Advanced tabs, do not change anything and their settings are as shown below.
10. Click the OK button to confirm the settings and exit the Acrobat Distiller.
Step 2: Optimize the PDF document in Adobe Acrobat
1. Open the PDF document in Adobe Acrobat.
2. Choose File > Print. From the drop-down list of printer name, select "Adobe PDF".
3. Click the Properties button and the following dialog box will be shown. Select the Adobe PDF Conversion Settings tab. From the drop-down list of the Default Settings, select the settings that have been created at Step 1, e.g. "PDF FlipBook". Then click the OK button to confirm.
4. At the Print dialog box, select the Choose Paper Source by PDF page size check box. Please make sure the size shown at the Preview section is the same with the PDF document size. Click the OK button to start distilling/optimizing the PDF document.
5. You will be prompted to save the optimized PDF document in a folder. Browse to select a folder and give a file name. Click the Save button to confirm. Your optimized PDF document will be stored in the folder after optimization has finished.
