About compression and resampling in Acrobat 9
By Adobe – July 20, 2009
Many factors affect file size and file quality, but when you're working with image-intensive files, compression and resampling are important.
You can choose from a variety of file compression methods designed to reduce the file space used by color, grayscale, and monochrome images in your documents. Which method you choose depends on the kind of images you are compressing. The default Adobe PDF presets use automatic (JPEG) compression for color and grayscale images and CCITT Group 4 compression for monochrome images.
In addition to choosing a compression method, you can resample bitmap images in your file to reduce the file size. A bitmap image consists of digital units called pixels, whose total number determines the file size. When you resample a bitmap image, the information represented by several pixels in the image is combined to make a single larger pixel. This process is also called downsampling because it reduces the number of pixels in the image. (When you downsample or decrease the number of pixels, information is deleted from the image.)
Neither compression nor resampling affects the quality of text or line art.
Creating files from the clipboard
In Windows, you can copy content from any type of file and then choose File> Create PDF > From Clipboard in Acrobat to create a new PDF file. The Create PDF From Clipboard command uses Distiller to convert content to PDF, and the PDF content created in this way is fully searchable; it is not an image. (On Mac OS, use the From Clipboard Image command to convert screen shots.)
In Windows, you can also easily add text and graphics that you have copied to the clipboard to an existing PDF. Open the PDF file, and choose Document > Insert Pages > From Clipboard.