Computer Illiterate: I have a PDF document that is 15MB. This is way too big - is there a way I can make it smaller without zipping it?

The first thing to try is making the source file smaller. That is, whichever page layout or word processing doc was exported to PDF — for instance, save a copy of the original doc. The copy is usually smaller than the original. Then export that to PDF.

@frdelrosario I do not have the original copy (which was created in Indesign)

Zipping doesn’t reduce PDFs, they are already compressed.

If the file is not password protected, you may be able to reduce images and unnecessary pages.

Adobe Acrobat is Adobe’s program to do that. Foxit PDF Editor is another program which might work. Both programs can both be downloaded as free trials, so you can experiment.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/editor/

If you’re able to, you could copy and paste the contents of the document into a word processor like microsoft word or pages and save it as a .doc. Or you could paste the contents into a text editor like textedit, notepad or wordpad, and then save as a rich text file, .rtf. The file would be much smaller.

Otherwise, I’m not quite sure.

@bittercritter

I experimented with this: Opened a PDF in Preview (Apple’s image and PDF viewer), saved a copy of the PDF from Preview. In this instance, the copy turned out bigger , but mileage in Acrobat may vary.

Without the original INDD doc, you might not have success with this mission. PDF documents are typically compressed to be as “portable” as possible.

I am not sure if you have Acrobat professional or not but go “document” then “reduce file size”.

Otherwise I did a quick search on free PDF File size reduction on Google and got this

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=reduce+pdf+size+free&aq=f&oq=&aqi=