Options for optimizing images ...

[Puffolino]

When selecting a single image and doing a recompress, there are quite a lot of compression options available, like JPEG/ZIP.
When creating an optimized document (save as optimized), this option is not available, so I need to compress image by image if I need to shrink the document size very effective.

Any chance to get more options in the Optimize PDF dialog?

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello Puffolino,

While It is unlikely to appear in the "Optimize PDF" area (as recompressing can sometimes increase image size depending on settings), this is something we have seen requests for and are looking into.

Kind regards,

[Puffolino]

Cool.

Sometimes I have to shrink scanned scripts as much as possible - actually the best results are often by using an external graphic editor to save the images in "exotic" formats (e.g. 4 bit grayscale in TIFF format) to get much better compression results than doing this job with the PDFXChange Editor.

Even it wouldn't be used very often, an oprion "Best compression method" or "Automatic mode" for recompressing a single image could be interesting. This would do all compressing variants and display a statistic of the resulting sizes (and the calculation time for compressing). This would be time consuming of course, but would be a good hint which method should be prefered for certain image types (photo, drawing, logos,...)

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello Puffolino,

While we have mused the idea of offer a "best compression method" option, it has been brushed almost completely under the rug for the reasons you mentioned earlier, excessive time consumption.

Do keep in mind the time it already takes to recompress the images. If we were to run all possible combinations of compression, it would multiply the processing time, and would often result in the most damaged version of the image possible, causing many users to discard the image entirely and try again with different settings.

If the majority of people are going to look at it and choose to try again anyway, it is certainly much better to not offer that option and save everyone the wasted time (both from a development and end user perspective).

It is also entirely expected that specialized image editing software will be better at tasks like this. Our products are developed to manipulate PDF documents, not images.

Kind regards,