How to Make a PDF Smaller on Mac

Audrey Goodwin

2020-05-27 17:02:24 • Filed to: PDFelement for Mac How-Tos • Proven solutions

Can I make PDF file smaller on Mac? PDF documents have massively gained popularity over the years due to their portability and the fact that they retain their formatting despite the platform being used. Since these PDF files retain their formatting, some end up being quite large in size therefore making the sharing process quite difficult. In this article, we will be looking at how to make a PDF smaller on Mac, including the latest macOS Catalina.

How to Make a PDF File Smaller on Mac

The process of making a PDF file smaller on Mac involves a few easy steps as highlighted below.

Step 1. Download PDFelement

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Step 2. Open the PDF Document

To do this, open PDFelement on your Mac. This action will reveal the main menu where previously opened PDF files will be displayed. If the file you wish to open is not listed among the previously opened files, click on the "Open File" option at the bottom of the page to direct you to the file storage location where the document is located.

Step 3. Make PDF File Smaller on Mac

Once the PDF file is open, click on "File" on the menu bar to reveal a drop-down menu. On the drop-down menu, select the "Save as Other" option which will further reveal three options labelled "Save as Flatten", "Optimized PDF" and "Archivable PDF (PDF/A-2b)". Select "Optimized PDF" to proceed to selecting the type of optimization you would desire.

On the menu that is revealed after clicking on "Optimized PDF" various optimization options are available. These options can be selected by dragging the slider that is provided. By dragging it to "low", the size of the PDF document will be reduced drastically therefore also reducing its quality. By selecting "Medium", the document's size will still be reduced but not as much as to result in a significant loss of quality. Selecting "High" optimizes the document just enough as not to alter its quality at all. The size will therefore not be reduced by much.

When going through all these optimization options, the original size of the document is displayed as well as the size of the expected document. This program also presents the information in terms of a ratio between the original document and the new document.

PDFelement is an application that is specifically designed to simplify how users interact with PDF files. It does this by incorporating various functions that are accessible by a click of a button. Some of these functions include:

Create. With this feature, users are able to convert documents that are in formats such as word to PDF documents.
Edit. With the edit feature, users have the ability to make changes to a PDF document directly without having to convert it to a format such as word.
Convert. Convert is a feature that enables users to transform documents from PDF to any file format of their choice. This can be especially useful when they are done with editing the documents.
Comments. This tool gives users the freedom to add comments to documents to further enhance the understanding of readers who might interact with the said document.
Review. This is a feature that enables authors view the remarks of other readers accessing their documents so as to learn and make changes where necessary.
Form creation, editing and collection. With this tool, users are able to create forms from scratch, edit the content of these forms as well as analyze the data collected in the forms to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.
Passwords and permissions. It provides users with the ability to encrypt PDF documents with passwords so as to limit the people who can access the contents of the documents.
Redacting of Information. When users are working on sensitive information, it gives them the ability to permanently delete it from the PDF document.

Tips for Making a PDF Smaller on Mac

PDF files are widely used today in work spaces as well as in storing personal files. It is therefore essential that we find ways of making the PDF files smaller to ease in their transmission across the internet. When looking for these ways of making pdf files smaller, you should be on the lookout for the following factors:

Always have a backup of the file you are reducing in size. This cannot be stressed enough as it gives you peace of mind when working on the file that should it be damaged in any way you still have a file to go back to.
When making a PDF file smaller, you should be careful not to shrink the size too much since it also affects the quality of images in the file.
Lastly, to ensure your PDF files are quite small in size, avoid scanning documents. Instead, you can electronically convert them by saving them as PDF files. This makes them considerably smaller than the scanned documents.

Looking for the best application to make PDF files smaller on your Mac PC can be a challenging undertaking. With various software developers offering applications with almost similar functionality, distinguishing the best among them is not an easy task. However, PDFelement stands out from the rest of these applications as it performs all those functions while still being the cheapest option. It also has a very user friendly interface that makes it easy to use and understand.

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