Shrinking your PDF files

Our parent company recently started releasing PDFs of product catalogs, which has been something I've asked for repeatedly. The problem is that they were generated from the original print jobs, so every graphic element is rendered individually. The result is a 6M document (for eight pages) that slowly paints each element every time you scroll. On top of that, there are foreign fonts used that aren't embedded. Ugh!

So, how to fix? I just opened the PDF file, then reprinted it using Acrobat Distiller (not PDFWriter). I have the properties for Distiller set to "eBook". The resulting file is about 700K!

Now I'm able to create templates in Goldmine to send PDFs of our pretty brochures. Cool!