Panic's free ShrinkIt turns humongous Illustrator PDFs into tiny ones

Umm why not just create and automator service that uses preview to open and save your document? It's all right there built into the OS.

Interestingly, I ran into this issue (again) recently when developing some dynamic PDFs for a client. Contrary to what some folks are saying, I have not found an all Adobe workflow and the tools that are provided within Acrobat Pro or Distiller, or even the parent apps of Illustrator or InDesign to adequately relieve files of their bloat.

In my specific last project the files were 180k coming out of Acrobat Pro, but when simply opened into Preview and saved back out, they were 55k. Clearly, there is room for improvement.

The "PDF Optimizer" tool within Acrobat Pro works... sort of... I think its misleading because, as the Panic folks and I have discovered, no matter what checkmarks you have checked supposedly relieving the file of useless metadata, user data, object data, etc. it will still retain a lot of that data and useless junk data as well.

This is a fairly useless application, unless you run Snow Leopard.

Which for me would mean upgrading half a dozen other applications. thanks but no thanks.

WARNING: ShrinkIt may damage your PDFs. When tested it on a few PDFs, it made the letter "o" disappear from a white paper PDF (from Siemens Engineering and Automation):

THE ORIGINAL SENTENCE READS:
"What kind of controller is best for your application?"

AFTER USING THE APP, IT READS:
"What kind f c ntr ller is best for y ur applicati n?"

The letter "o" wasn't deleted, but ShrinkIt turned the black type white. I must warn and recommend against this app.

Well . . . if you know how to (trial by fire) make PDF's using Adobe applications, there is no need for external apps. At my old service bureau (I closed it down when direct to plate and high res low cost printers came available to Joe Public.) we used PDF's long before Adobe tried to force the format down peoples throats which caused a bit of a backlash that made Adobe lay quiet for a while. But when they returned the apps had provisions to "optimize" PDF's. Although, not easy to use, but if you take a little time to figure it out, you have yourself a power set of tools. I despise Acrobat Pro, but the resulting documents that I get have been and will continue to be a life saver on many levels. The one thing that really gets me it when manufacturers PDF print files with bleeds, crop & registration marks, and color bars. This can make a PDF very large. Just cropping and resaving can severely reduce the size of a PDF. Resaving with Optimized settings can also work wonders on any PDF, not just vector based.

people just need to learn to use their software properly. Save As PDF maintains flexibility, while Print To PDF Distiller produces lean files.

Why should someone need to download an app to get another app to work properly? Adobe is stupid and bloated. Adobe just needs to die.

Aka adobe distiller

More proof that Adobe is sloppy, lazy and bloated. Just like Flash. I have noticed the same thing in Photoshop, PDF's are larger than if saved other ways. Adobe is fat and bloated, look how long it takes to load Photoshop.

I wasn't going to bother with this app, but hey, its free. Plus I use Coda which is probably one of the best web design tools out there.