Decreasing .PDF Size

[Fifty]

So I want to print about a 400 page .PDF at school.

The problem is, the printers at school seem to have some sort of a mechanism such that files of a certain size (in kb not in pages) cannot be printed. This has happened before when I've had to print 200+ pages, and usually I can just print in ~50 page increments and be fine.

It seems, however, that this particular .pdf that I want to print is of such "high quality" that it is too big unless I print in like 10 page increments. I don't want to print it in 10 page increments, though, because that would take forever.

So, is there any way to decrease the quality of the .pdf such that the file size is much smaller? Alternatively, is there any way to extract the "plain text" from the .pdf? I'd rather not just copy/paste, because I want to preserve the integrity of the footnoting and so on.

 

[Mise]

In my uni we could open PDFs for editing in Word. There's probably a freeware PDF editor/plugin somewhere that allows you to edit PDFs. Then you can save it as a Word file (or whatever) and print it.

 

[Fifty]

And would it preserve the footnoting and whatnot when you do that?

 

[Heretic_Cata]

PDF to Word converters SUCK really hard. Especially if you have some more complex things like non-english letters or basic math stuff like x^2.

There has to be free programs that let you edit pdfs ... Isn't LaTEX used for this ? I remember you could make very complex pdfs with it but never tried editing old ones. The program was sorta odd so i dunno.

EDIT: and yea i have a problem with big pdfs for my laser printer too. It barely prints 5-10pages per minute if it's from big pdfs compared to 20/minute from word or small pdfs ...

 

[kuukkeli]

There has to be free programs that let you edit pdfs ... Isn't LaTEX used for this ? I remember you could make very complex pdfs with it but never tried editing old ones. The program was sorta odd so i dunno.

LaTeX I believe is not a solution to Fifty's problem. It's just a document markup language and an accompanying typesetting system (which among other features can create pdf files). As far as I know it offers no help to modifying existing pdf documents.

I'm not aware of any programs that would do the required job. Editing pdf files is something they're not designed for. Those Word converters (never used one) and some pdf-to-text scanners are only things that come to mind but I doubt if either will produce an output that's ready to be printed.

 

[Ankka]

One solution is to of course think about it again: do you actually need 400 pages of paper, or could you just read them on-screen?

 

[Speedo]

Almost all pdfs carry a lot of extra info so that allows them to be backwards compatible with older versions of Acrobat/Reader. Depending on what the problem actually is, getting rid of that might or might not help, however I think you actually need Acrobat to remove that extra info.

 

[Mise]

Could you try copying it as a picture and saving it as a .jpg or something? Might reduce the size a bit...

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Could you try copying it as a picture and saving it as a .jpg or something? Might reduce the size a bit...

Thats likely to get quite tedious though.

You could try the Adobe Acrobat Pro Trial. 30 days of full functionality should allow you to get that pdf printed out.