Bloating of size of PDF

[Victor Warner]

Using version 2.5.210.

I have a number of PDFs which

1. consist of several pages from scans (at 300dpi)
2. have the OCR function run; and
3. have an extensive of use of the highlight, typewriter and text box tools.

An 8 page document would be around 6.5 to 7.5 megabytes.

I also need to use/view the PDFs on an Ipad (using iannotate (http://www.branchfire.com/, synchronised via Dropbox).

At some point for some of the files increase in file size to almost 40 megabytes. It does not happen to all files and only happens from time to time.

Running PDF Tools Simple Optimisation does not reduce the file size.

Is there anything I can do about this (to bring the file size down again). Displaying pages, however, is not significantly affected by the increase in file size.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi Victor,

I'm not sure from your description if the file size increase is a result of making changes in our Viewer or on the iPad. If it is the changes made in our Viewer would you be able to send us some before and after versions of the same files so we can compare them?

[Victor Warner]

Belated response to request for before and after files. I have filed a support request to support@pdf-xchange.com with links to before and after files.


After an extensive exchange of emails with Branchfire the makes of iAnnotate, their final response is:

PDFX-Change’s inclusion of non-standard annotations can cause bloat in mobile applications like iAnnotate because we attempt to read, understand and render them and unfortunately unlike many desktop clients we are limited by the technologies built into and available for the iPad. This attempt to render are saved back to the file for future reference by iAnnotate and thus the file size is increased to include this additional meta data. This can mean for some files the file size increases greatly as there are essentially copies of the same data on the file, one copy of how the data was originally written and one for how its been reprocessed and saved.

Opening the files in Adobe Acrobat iPad version and resynchronising via Dropbox does not cause the bloat.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi Victor,

the files have multiple fonts embedded. Every time you close a session of the Viewer with a new annotation the fonts need to be embedded again. If you take your large file with the many annotations, export them to fdf file then import them back into your original it will save them from a single session and be a much smaller file as it will reference all the embedded fonts only once.

hth