How to shrink PDF file size using Microsoft Print to PDF






The "Microsoft Print to PDF" functionality is often used when you don't have a license of Adobe and still would like to print your PDF as another PDF, e.g., print PDF to get rid of all security/password related restrictions of the original document.

While the functionality is awesome and free, one limitation might be the output file size sometimes is less optimized, which results in oversized file to upload to some websites. For example, the Original Doc in the following is 1,852KB only while using the "Microsoft Print to PDF" default settings results in 19,390KB. I cannot upload the file to a website with an upload limit of 10MB for instance.




Microsoft Print to PDF default setting


As an alternative, I found that enabling the "Print As Image" option in the "Advanced" option reduces the file output size to some extent, as shown in the first figure above. As we can notice from the figure, with this setting, the output file size is reduced to 5,166KB compared to 19,390KB. Now I can submit this file to the website with an upload limit of 10MB.

Microsoft Print to PDF enable "Print As Image"




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