Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 18. Repurposing and Batch Processing

PDF documents designed for one purpose, such as for commercial printing, might need to be repurposed for other output intent such as Web hosting or for copying to CD-ROMs. Rather than going back to the original authoring program and recreating PDFs for each purpose, you can use tools in Acrobat that enable you to downsample file sizes and strip unnecessary content. The resulting documents can then be more efficiently viewed on Web sites or exchanged via email.

You may have several files that need to be repurposed or edited in some other way using menu commands. Rather than open each file independently and apply menu commands, you can create batch sequences that apply commands to several files in one operation.

In this chapter, you learn how to repurpose PDF documents using some Acrobat tools and methods for downsizing file sizes and eliminating content unnecessary for other viewing purposes. In addition, you take a look at automating tasks by creating batch sequences.

Setting Up the Environment

To downsize files and optimize them for other output circumstances, you don't need to access any special tools. The menu commands offer all the means for repurposing files. Therefore, set up your Acrobat work environment by opening a context menu on the Toolbar Well and selecting Reset Toolbars from the menu options.

Reducing File Sizes

Reducing file sizes often occurs with downsampling images — that is to say, reducing the image resolution of all raster ...