want smaller sized PDF files

[rdmayo]

I have downloaded pdf files of a 3-6 page financial statement from my broker and these are approximately 30-60K in size, very readable, and printable. When I try to scan in a paper statement (same number of pages) for a period not included in the on-line archive,

and create a PDF file,the file size is multiple megabytes in size.

I have tried lowering resolution but the results were less than satisfactory.

How does one create a 30K PDF file by scanning a 3-6 page document..

RDMAYO

[Claudiu (Softland)]

Hi, well the reason the PDF is larger when you do a scan and after that converting it to doPDF is because a scan basically sends an image to doPDF (a large image) and doPDF cannot compress it.
To create smaller PDF files you should try performing OCR on the scan, and after that converting it to doPDF.

Another solution would be to change the resolution of the image your scanner creates, for instance if your scanner creates high-res tiff files you should lower the dpi to 72 for instance (so that the resulting scanned image has lower dpi).
Anyway, the thing is that doPDF compresses text more, so if in a document you manage to have as much text as possible, the compression would be higher. Your broker might create the PDF files directly from a financial application (not by scanning them first), so that might be an explanation why he creates 30kb pdf files.

[Claudiu (Softland)]

This topic seems to be popular for people looking to create smaller PDF files, so for new arrivals you can start by installing and using doPDF, and if you're not happy with the size of the PDF files it creates you can follow the guideliness here to reduce the PDF size - http://www.dopdf.com/forum/topic/keeping-file-size-down