Adobe® Acrobat® X PDF Bible

Chapter 17. Repurposing and Creating Actions

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Downsizing files

• Creating Custom Actions

PDF documents designed for one purpose, such as for commercial printing, might need to be repurposed for other output intent such as Web hosting or for copying to CD-ROMs. Rather than going back to the original authoring program and recreating PDFs for each purpose, you can use tools in Acrobat that enable you to downsample file sizes and strip unnecessary content. The resulting documents can then be more efficiently viewed on Web sites or exchanged via email.

You may have several files that need to be repurposed or edited in some other way using menu commands. Rather than open each file independently and apply menu commands, you can create batch sequences that apply commands to several files in one operation.

In this chapter, you learn how to repurpose PDF documents using some Acrobat tools and methods for downsizing file sizes and eliminating content unnecessary for other viewing purposes. In addition, you take a look at automating tasks by creating custom actions.

Reducing File Sizes

Reducing file sizes often occurs with downsampling images — that is to say, reducing the image resolution of all raster images or compressing images with higher compression options. In addition, you can reduce file sizes by eliminating redundant backgrounds; eliminating objects such as form fields, comments, bookmarks, and destinations; unembedding fonts; and/or compressing the document structure. You can ...