So in my desperate search for ways to optimize PDF files, I’ve found that there aren’t many free options. Although there are a lot of shareware programs, there are also, thankfully, a few free programs can help you reduce a PDF file size.

Irfanview & GhostScript [Windows & Possibly Linux]

If you don’t have Irfanview, you should really consider downloading it. It’s a much better and lightning fast alternative to the default image viewer in Windows, supports countless plugins that allow it to be extremely versatile, and converts images to different file types. You can use it to add borders and watermarks to your photos, and batch process many images at a time. You can also view PDF files, provided you download GhostScript first.

Once you have Ghostscript installed, you can use Irfanview (portable version will work as well) to view PDF files and save them as new files. You’ll get a box on the right of the Save As dialog to choose compression levels.

You can choose to save with lossless, best, high, medium, and ‘dump’ quality. In my tests, Irfanview reduced a 14MB PDF file to 8MB using the high-quality setting in Compression, while the lossless and best quality settings produced files bigger than the original size.

PrimoPDF [Windows]

PrimoPDF is a desktop application that allows you to create PDF files from image files and documents.

It installs itself as a virtual printer, which makes optimizing PDF files a matter of opening the files and printing them with PrimoPDF, though you can also drag and drop documents to the PrimoPDF desktop shortcut. From there, you’ll get a dialog box, where you can choose the document quality.

For the smallest file size, choose the Screen setting. Pressing Create PDF starts the conversion.

Free PDF Compressor (version 1.12) [Windows]

This program is now shareware but the link provided leads to the last freeware version. It is pretty much just an executable that does a decent job at reducing PDF file sizes. In my tests, this program managed to reduce a 50MB PDF file to 45MB, with the maximum compression level, at an impressive speed (almost instant conversion).

Neevia’s PDFCompress [Web-Based]

PDFCompress is a simple web app that takes any PDF files smaller than 5MB and compresses them according to the presets you chose (low, medium, high and maximum). Maximum compression means the quality will be approximately a 10 in a scale of 100. In my test with a 3MB file and maximum compression, the optimized file was about 9% smaller, with no visible quality loss.

I should also mention PDF ReDirect which is another Windows-only PDF printer that lets you optimize and rotate PDF files, which we previously reviewed here.

What free software do you use to reduce PDF file size? Let us know in the comments!

Kindle, iPad and other e-book readers and tablets might be the future of publishing, but nothing can replace the feeling of reading from the printed page – yet. That’s why most people still buy printed books and print articles from the web. But if you’ve ever tried to print webpages, you will know how horrible the results can be. To overcome this problem, people have invented tools like Readable, Readability and Instapaper, that come up with their own version of good looking printed webpages.

If you are on a quest to find a way to print nice looking webpages – either physically or digitally, you could try joliprint. This service will create a pretty PDF from any web page, and it will also help you add PDF-printing features on your website or blog.

Readers: Just Add The Address

From the readers’ point of view, using joliprint is as easy as writing down the web address and clicking the “joliprint it!” button.

The web service will compile the information on the page, strip out the unnecessary elements, convert it into PDF, and send the result to be downloaded by the user’s browser. This is a good way to collect information for your research. Later on, whether or not you want to print the PDFs into physical copies is up to you.

To see how good the PDF result is, I “joliprint”-ed one MakeUseOf article. Below is the result. To make the pages easier to read and to optimize the use of space on the paper, joliprint divides the text into two columns. It also resizes the images to fit the column width.

Then I printed the same article into PDF – unmodified. I got the same layout as the website, along with the ads. Even though the web layout might be best for web viewing, it’s not optimized for printing.

Another thing to note is that after comparing the two printouts, the joliprint version took less pages (only 3 pages) than the non-modified PDF version (6 pages).

While adding web addresses one by one to be PDF-printed is fine on one or two occasions, you might want to install joliprint’s bookmarklet if you do a lot of web printing.

After dragging and dropping the bookmarklet button to your browser’s bookmark bar, give it a name.

Now you can easily print any webpage that you encounter by clicking the bookmarklet.

Publishers: Integrate The Print Feature

If you own a website or blog, you’ll do your visitors a great favor by adding the joliprint button. To do that, go to the “Get the button” page and follow the instructions.

The first step is to decide the type of your site.

If your site is a normal website, choose the kind of button that you want to use.

The last step is to get the embed code, then copy and paste the code to your website.

But if you own a WordPress blog, you’ll get more power by installing the joliprint plugin. You can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository, or…

You can search and install the plugin from within your WordPress blog admin area.

After the plugin is installed, you can customize several things about joliprint via its “Options” pages.

One of the available customizations is the header of the resulting PDFs. You can use your blog name as the header or define your own text header. You can even use your own graphic as the header.

Another cool thing you can add to your joliprint feature is Google Analytics. By inserting your analytics code, you can track down and analyze the statistics of PDF-printing that your visitors do from your blog.

After you are done with the settings, you can check out your blog to see whether the joliprint buttons appear and whether the feature works well. By default, the joliprint button will appear at the end of posts and pages.

As a person who still relies heavily on printed documentation, I find joliprint’s service to be indispensable. What about you? Have you tried joliprint? What do you think about printing out webpages? Do you use other similar services?

Please share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

Among the many applications with a hint of usability, PDF ReDirect was particularly enticing because of the sheer number of favorable reviews. PDF ReDirect is a simple virtual printer that creates PDF files from document files but also bundles some PDF editing features, such as PDF file merging, page rotating, and PDF optimizing. Being currently the fourth most popular application on CNET’s Document Management Software category, behind Foxit and Adobe Reader, the application promises no advertisements or restrictions of any kind (though there’s a tab on the program featuring the Pro version that thankfully, isn’t obtrusive at all), so I thought I’d give it a try.

The installation file is about 7MB while the application will occupy 12.9MB once installed. Like most other PDF ‘converters’, it installs as a virtual printer for you to effortlessly create a PDF file out of any printable file. Unlike most virtual printers, it comes with a few options to modify your freshly dished PDF.

You can join your new PDF file with other PDF’s by adding documents into the Merge List.

Using the arrow buttons gives you the ability to reorder the pages, which you can preview to the right. You can also preview any PDF documents elsewhere in your hard drive, which you can navigate in the built-in file explorer to the left.

Before you save your new (merged or not) PDF file, you can adjust the picture quality, which means that you can adjust how big your ending PDF file will be. There are 4 levels of optimization. The default is Good, which is a step above Low (quality), which is recommended if you’re looking to optimize your file to get a small file size.

You can also choose to rotate the pages in your PDF file. 

If you want additional security measures, PDF ReDirect offers the option to encrypt (set a password) your PDF file.

Although it packs some PDF-editing goodies, PDF ReDirect doesn’t offer PDF bursting, a term that refers to creating separate PDF files from each page in a PDF file, essentially splitting a PDF file. And although there aren’t direct ways or buttons to, say, extract pages from a PDF file, you could manually select to print those specific pages you want to extract. Same concept applies if you want to delete a few pages from a PDF file: You would need to manually select to print the pages before the ones you want out, which will pop up in PDF ReDirect, then selecting the pages after the ones to delete, which will also appear in PDF ReDirect’s Merge List.

If you need additional features, you’ll most likely have to use something else, which isn’t too bad considering there are some genuinely good tools available for free. For a watermarking feature, for example, the excellent PDF-XChange Viewer offers that and even more document markup options, such as commenting. There is also PDFEscape, a web-based tool for merging, splitting and rotating PDF files. The open-source Inkscape also lets you move the objects in the actual PDF’s, although you can only import 1 PDF page at a time.

It’d be great if all of these features were available on a single (free) application, but these separate programs are definitely not bad for what they offer. What do you use to mark up or edit your PDF files?

Whether you’re catering to Kindle or iPad users, whether you’re doing it for fun or want to sell your eBook online, each of these services has something for you.

Anthologize

If you have a WordPress blog and want to turn your blog posts into a book, the easiest, no-hassle way to do this is to use the WordPress plugin, Anthologize. Download the plugin and upload the zip file to your plugins folder through your WordPress dashboard.

Once you’ve activated the plugin in, you’ll find two new tabs in your menu ““ the Anthologize tab, and the imported content tab. With Anthologize, not only can you use content from your own blog, you can also import content from other sites with an RSS feed.

Anthologize makes the process as easy as you could possibly imagine. If you’re using content from your own blog, you can filter your posts by tags or by category.

Once you’ve decided what content you want to use, you can start creating “˜Parts’ or chapters. Create a new part, and drag and drop the posts that you want to include. Any images in your posts will be included as they appeared in the post.

Once you have all your chapters and content ready, you can export it in one of several formats including PDF and ePub. You can also include a dedication or acknowledgement, choose between A4 or letter size, and select the font.

The final file includes a copyright page, where it states that the ebook was generated by Anthologize, while the table of contents consists of click through links leading you the content at the click of a button.

Zinepal

If you don’t use wordpress, Zinepal an easy-to-use alternative that will help you achieve similar results. Simply enter the URL to your blog or feed, and it will pull up a list of the latest posts.

Select the posts you want to use and add them to your ebook. Of course, the list is limited to the most recent stories from any given site. If you want to include older posts, you can use the handy bookmarklet and clicking on it on any given webpage you want to add to your eBook. You can also use this method to create an entire eBook without using an RSS feed at all.

Once you’ve added all your content, you can choose the fonts and preview the ebook in PDF format. The ebook itself can be created as a PDF, in ePub format or in Kindle format.

Zinepal uses a magazine-like layout, but you do have a certain amount of control over the appearance as far as fonts and the number of columns used. When previewing your eBook, click on ‘Customize eBook’ to change the orientation, page size, number of columns and more.

You can also add your own logo and advertising to your eBook using Zinepal, and although it would appear that you can choose to keep your ebook private on their site, there seems to be a glitch with that feature at the moment.

ePub Bud

Although ePub Bud doesn’t provide an easy way to convert your blog to an eBook, it has a great feature that earns it a spot on this list. Catering primarily to a children’s books audience, you can create any kind of book on their site, share it with the community and download the .epub file ePub Bud’s best feature by far is that it gives you the ability to sell your book through their site, and they don’t take a percentage of your profits. The only payment method accepted through the site is Paypal.

Creating the ebook itself is a cinch. If you already have your book in PDF or .doc format, you can upload it to the site and convert it to the .epub format. If you want to use content from your site, use Zinepal to conver the RSS feed into a PDF file and upload that to ePub Bud.

And if you’d rather start from scratch, use their intuitive, easy-to-use interface to get all your text and pictures into your ebook, and format the text exactly the way you want it to appear.

Also be sure to check out Saikat’s in-depth review of another similar service, eBook Hood.

Which of these free eBooks services is right for you? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Lichtmeister

PDFCreator, however, is an open source alternative that lets you create Adobe PDF files. While it doesn’t have the advanced features contained in the latest Adobe Acrobat, it does pack enough power to deal with everyday PDF requirements easily.

How It Works

PDFCreator is an elegant piece of software and is very good at what it does. It installs a virtual printer driver, and any file which is sent to that printer, results in a PDF document.

Once sent to print, the user gets a dialog box to customize anything that he/she might want to. This dialog box also asks for the path of the final document.

Once all settings are finalized, the printer produces a spanking, sparkling new PDF file.

Create Your First PDF for Free

First of all, head over to the PDFCreator page and download the latest version. It’s larger than the average utility at 17.8MB and will take a few minutes to download.

Once downloaded, run the installer and install the application. For current purposes, select “Standard Installation” when prompted during the installation.

After the installation is completed, fire up PDFCreator from your Start Menu. You’ll be greeted with the screen shown below. This is PDFCreator’s PDF Print Monitor, and this is where you customize all the settings of your virtual PDF printer.

First of all, we are going to customize the printer so that it gives us the perfect PDF as output. Head over to “Printer > Options” to bring up the Options dialog box. This should bring up an intimidating looking dialog box with  a myriad of options for you to change. Don’t fret though, as we’ll help you get going with this guide. We’ll leave certain settings at their optimized defaults and change some others to suit our needs.

Click on the “Document” link in the left hand navigation of the Options dialog box. In the right hand side, make the following changes as per your needs:

• Use Standard Author: Check this option, and enter the text that you want to display under the author field of your PDFs. You can use certain standard tokens for this. Select the token you want from the “Add an Author-Token section“. Selecting this will auto-generate author names for you.
• Use The Current Date/Time For Creation Date: Check this to time-stamp your PDFs with the exact date/time of their creation.

Next, click on the “Save” link in the left hand navigation pane. In the right hand side, make the following changes:

• Filename: Enter some text that you’d want to be part of the filename for all your PDFs. Again, you can use Filename-Tokens to auto-generate filenames. For our example, let us leave it at the default, which is “<Title>”. This tells the printer to use the title of the current window as the filename for the document.

Finally, click the “Actions” link in the left hand navigation pane. These settings let you define any actions that you’d like the printer to perform before/after printing your document.

For example, you may want to display a pop-up message once the PDF has been printed successfully. Use the screenshot below as a reference and configure your own version similarly.

Now that you are done, click on the “Save” button and commit all your changes to memory. It’s now time to test the latest geeky addition on your computer. Just head over to any application that supports printing and give it a file to print to create PDF files for free. Make sure you select PDFCreator as the printer before you finalize the command, or else you’ll be printing to some other device. Once done, do let us know about your PDF creation experience in the comments.

In case you want a lightweight PDF Reader to go with your new PDF Printer, check out the previously featured Nuance PDF Reader here.

But this “highly uneditable” feature is also PDF’s disadvantage to other “easily editable” formats like txt, rtf and doc. While it’s possible to create PDF documents with fillable forms (you can download an example of such a thing from Adobe’s site), the creation process requires advanced PDF tools – which are expensive and not accessible by most people.

So should we get the expensive PDF tools just to create a so-called interactive document? If you are using Mac, there are better solutions to this problem. Mac systems come with native tools to create and annotate PDF documents easily.

How to Create PDF Documents

We’ll start with the easy part: creating the PDF. When I first switched to Mac, I searched all over the web for an application to create PDF documents without knowing that this ability already comes natively with Mac.

All you have to do is “print” the document using the “File > Print” menu or “Command + P” shortcut.

Then, instead of clicking the “Print” button, you click the “PDF” button and choose the “Save as PDF” option.

The Save window is pretty basic, you write down the file name and you choose the save location.

But there’s an additional feature that you can apply to the document: security. Click the “Security Options” button and a new window will appear, letting you put in a password to open the document, to copy the content, and to print the document. All you have to do is to check the box(es) in front of your security choice(s) and write down the preferred password(s).

After everything is set, you can click the “OK” and “Save” buttons.

Annotating A PDF

The default Mac OS X document opener (and also a PDF reader) – Preview, has an underused feature called Annotate. This ability allows users to slightly modify, including adding notes, ordinary PDF documents. While completely editing the PDF is still out of the question, it’s possible to fill in any PDF form using the annotation feature.

When you open PDF with Preview, you’ll quickly see the “Annotate” icon in the toolbar. This feature is also accessible from the “Tools > Annotate” menu.

Clicking the icon will open up the Annotate bar at the bottom of the window.

There are several annotation tools available for you to use. You can add:

• Arrow (Command + Control + A)
• Oval (Command + Control + O)
• Rectangle (Command + Control + R)
• Text (Command + Control + T)
• Note (Command + Control + N)
• and Link (Command + Control + L)

You can also modify the text by giving it:

• Highlight (Command + Control + H)
• Strike through (Command + Control + S)
• and Underline (Command + Control + U)

After annotating the PDF, you can select and view those annotations quickly by opening the sidebar and choose the annotation view.

And don’t forget to save the document if you want to keep your annotations.

To those who often create PDF documents, these features might not look impressive. But for ordinary folks like me who have just discovered the tools, this annotation ability will surely come in handy.

Other alternative PDF readers/editors that you can try are: FormulatePro and Skim.

Do you feel that your life is surrounded by PDFs? Do you annotate your documents? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.