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Splitting PDFs while preserving quality

votes

For easier presentation, we need to break some very large PDFs into smaller files (we already have the originals saved in TIFF format). However, when we do this via Adobe, the total file sizes get halved, e.g. a 600MB PDF results in 6 PDFs that total 300MB in size. Does this denote loss of quality? How do I check? And what's the best way to break large PDFs into smaller files without that loss of quality?

I thought this info would be relatively easy to find on the Adobe web site or elsewhere, but no luck so far.

asked by bernieh on 21 Jan 2015 · 240 views

1 answer

votes

How are you breaking them up in Acrobat? I suspect if you manually extract pages and save, Acrobat should only optimize the structure and l leave the images alone.

Acrobat might also be combining object to optimize the structure and therefore reducing size. You can check images in the original and the split PDF to see if the compression type has changed, this would be one way to tell if quality is affected.

I like to use pdftk to burst the PDF out into individual pages and then use the same program to concatenate the pages I want back together. This way there is no changes to the objects at all.

answered by thorsted on 19 May 2015