Excel – PDFs as extremely small file size (i.e. less than 20kb)

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What do I need to do in order to produce PDF invoices with a file size smaller than 20kb?

Example PDF

I create invoices for a small business and I have 60,000+ invoices stored as PDFs (non scanned) that are about 108kb per page on average. I generate these invoices from an Excel spreadsheet and save them as PDFs. I've noticed documents from other companies, or even my own bank statement as PDFs that are less than 20kb per page on average.

(UPDATED 3/17) I've used the Acrobat Audit tool (accessible in the "Save as" window when selecting "Optimized PDF" from the drop-down and then clicking the settings button, on Acrobat XI). Here is the result:

    Content Streams    3.48145 KB
    Fonts             91.98340 KB
    Structure Info    11.72852 KB
    Document Overhead  0.64453 KB
    -----------------------------
    TOTAL             107.8379 KB

What I've tried:

  • I attempted to use Acrobat XI's "Optimize Scanned PDF" settings, but I get "Page contains renderable text."
  • I attempted to "Save as" choosing the file type of "Adobe PDF Files, Optimized (*.pdf)". The results were slightly smaller, but not less than 20kb or even less than 90kb.
  • I've tried Web apps that have about the same effect as the aforementioned "Save as" attempt.

Best Answer

From the result of Acrobat Audit tool, the biggest part of your PDF is due to Fonts inclusion (91kb) , not to real PDF content (3kb+11kb).

So you can try some of the following:

  • use a single font for the whole document
  • while using a single font, try out different fonts to see which on give you the smallest size (I've had the same problem years ago, bay using different font the document size varied wildly from 13kb to 150kb)
  • some software that generate PDF have an option to include only the used characters of a font, instead of the whole font character set, maybe this could reduce the file size a bit (PDF Creator comes to mind)
  • some software that generate PDF have an option to render the text as vector graphics, so it wont need to include the fonts. If the text contents of the PDF is small, this could reduce the file size (I've seen this options somewhere, but I can't remind in which software...)
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