I had the opportunity to review a few PDF printers. If you aren't familiar with these sorts of software, they setup a fake printer so that anything you can print can also be turned into a PDF. This is pretty handy when putting information onto the web that you want to be sure looks the same on all computers. PDF is great for that.
Anyway, here is a comparison of file sizes between a few different PDF printers. In each we started with the same Word document. It is a 10 page newsletter with a lot of images in it and setup as 2 columns. The starting size of the document is 121Mb (127689216 bytes).
When put through PrimoPDF, the resulting PDF is 8,333Kb (8537859 bytes). PrimoPDF also produced the document the fastest. The other two were a bit slugish. PDF995 gave us a PDF document of 6,833Kb (6996372 bytes), a surprising decrease. PDF995 did seem to take significantly longer to produce its results, and then proceeded to annoy me by opening the document I already had open in the new PDF format an tossing some ads for their other products at me. I've been recommending CutePDF Writer for several years so was a bit biased towards this tool. It performed about as slow as PDF995 and produced a file almost equal in size at 6,838Kb (7001869 bytes). I think I'll continue to recommend CutePDF.
For our purposes, 6 Mb was still too big a file. I went in search of something to clean this up and came across the tool in Word to compress images and remove the cropped areas. Now this was useful, but in true Word style, it decided some of the pictures were on the wrong page, causing us to replace some pictures. The craziness of Word isn't the subject of this post though so I'll move on.
:-) Our 121Mb document was reduced to 13.2. The guy who was building this document use a number of high-res pictures. With this all cleaned up, I decided to run these tools again to see what happened. I, of course, noticed a dramatic speed increase in producing the PDF documents. :-) Here are the results.
| Printer | From 121Mb | From 13.2Mb |
| PrimePDF | 8.1Mb(8537859 bytes) | 3.8Mb(4008604 bytes) |
| PDF995 | 6.7Mb(6996372 bytes) | 1.1Mb(1191307 bytes) |
| CutePDF | 6.7Mb(7001869 bytes) | 1.1Mb(1196722 bytes) |
If PDF995 and CutePDF were any closer, I'd be wondering if someone ripped off the other's code. In any case, simply for annoyance factor, I'm not going with the slightly smaller file size and will stick with CutePDF.
