Hi all,
Does anyone know how to reduce the size of PDFs. I have just converted a OOo doc, which in native XML is around 67Kb. But as a PDF it's 608Kb. Have I done something stupid, or is this normal?

TIA

I think it depends a lot on whether the fonts used in the document must be encoded into the PDF. Try using a generic font like 'Times.' Also, I believe in OOo there is an option for producing "screen-optimized" PDFs, which can reduce the file size if there are graphic objects and whatnot in the document. In my experience, a good text-only PDF output is only a few times larger than what you'd expect for an ASCII text version of the file; my resume, for example, is 9K in .sxw format, 2K in ASCII, and 8K in PDF.

There are also some command-line utilities, most of which come with Ghostscript and xpdf, I think, that may help you compress PDFs. ps2ps, ps2pdf, pdf2ps, etc.

Excellent, Thanks for that. I have experimented with several fonts, and have found what I feel is acceptable between legibility and file size. Wish I'd thought of that in the first place.

<<MOD edit>>
Deleted irrelevant material which was also advertising

jenny*;
2 problems: You were talking about Windows SW, and you also appeared to have been advertising a particular product/website.

It is a bigger ratio than I would have expected (say, 3:1 rather than 10:1), but the trend is quite normal. You could get some of it back by compressing the file (gzip, bzip or something similar) if you are e-mailing the file, but for general use, it is probably more hassle than it is worth.

PDF FILE SIZE REDUCTION

I had a 2-page pdf file that was 10.6 MB
I first used:
pdf2ps file.pdf file.ps
I next used:
ps2pdf file.ps file2.pdf
results:
file.ps 19.4 MB
file2.pdf 1.8 MB

No apparent loss in visible quality, significant reduction of file size!

Best way to reduce the size is to convert it to djvu.