PDF
PDF Compress
Makes PDFs smaller without touching how they look: objects are repacked into compressed streams, raw streams are compressed and unused objects dropped; High also removes metadata and thumbnails.
When to use it
Use it before emailing or archiving PDFs made by tools that write them loosely.
In a pipeline
PDF File InputPDF CompressEmail Send
Settings
| Setting | Type | Required | Default or hint |
|---|---|---|---|
| PDF path column | select | — | Default: the PDF from the node before |
| Level | select | — | medium |
Example
Shrink before email
- Level=Medium — also compress raw streams, drop unused objects
| Size Before | Size After | Saved | PDF Output Path |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4182733 | 2911820 | 30% | …/report_compressed.pdf |
Worth knowing
- Images are not re-encoded (that needs a renderer), so a 40 MB scan of photos shrinks little; PDFs from report and office tools shrink most.
- A file never comes out bigger: if nothing could be saved, the original bytes are kept.
- Password-protected PDFs must be decrypted first.