How to automate Adobe Acrobat XI Standard to re-compress a lot of PDFs?

I've about 15 gigabyte of PDFs scanned with an old version of Adobe Acrobat that are huge.

Adobe Acrobat XI Standard that comes with my new scanner has an option to (it seems lossless) recompress these PDFs. Usually this saves over 2/3 of a document, often even 80% or 90%.

Given that there is about 7 thousand files, I want to automate this process.

This is how you do this manually:

1. open the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat XI Standard
2. in the File menu choose, Save as Other... then Reduced size PDF
3. in the dialog, from Make compatible with choose Acrobat 10 and later, then press OK
4. in the Save As dialog, keep the filename, then press Save
5. wait (sometimes long, this can take a minute for files that like 50 megabytes large) for completion

How can I automate this?

(it looks like the ScanSnap software does at least some UI automation here and there, so it looks possible somehow)

4 Answers

This is how I did it in Adobe Acrobat XI Standard:

• no need for the Action Wizard
• no need for AutoIt

The trick is to ensure no PDF files are open in Adobe Acrobat XI Standard. Then the Reduce side PDF... behaviour is different.

I used C:\temp as folder for the steps below. You can enhance the steps by

• using files from any set of folders
• drag/drop files from Windows Explorer, or compatible tool (like Everything Search Engine) to the list of files to process

These are the steps I used

1. Start Adobe Acrobat XI Standard, ensure there are no PDF files opened
2. in the File menu choose, Save as Other... then Reduced size PDF...
3. in the Arrange Documents dialog, choose Add Files..., then Add Files... (confused? see the images below)
4. in the Add Files dialog, select a bunch of PDF files
5. repeat steps 3. and 4 when needed, or drag files from Windows Explorer, Everything Search Engine, et cetera
6. in the Arrange Documents dialog, press OK
7. in the Reduce File Size dialog, from the Make compatible with listbox, choose Acrobat 10 and later, then press OK
8. in the Output Options dialog, keep the settings, then press OK
9. wait until the progress dialog has shown all files have been processed and returns itself to the main Adobe Acrobat XI Standard window

Notes:

• The wait can take very long, especially with thousands of files

• I converted on copies of each directory so I could view before/after results

  1. Started Adobe Acrobat XI Standard
  2. Main window: Chose File, then Save as Other..., then Reduced size PDF...
  3. Arrange Documents dialog: Chose Add Files..., then Add Files...
  4. Add files dialog: Added files from C:\temp
  5. Arrange Documents dialog: Choose OK
  6. Reduce File Size dialog: chose Acrobat 10 and later, then OK
  7. Output Options dialog: kept the settings, then pressed OK
  8. Progress dialog: wait until all files have been processed

You would create an Action, using the Action Wizard in Acrobat XI (Pro).

You can create a batch process in Adobe Acrobat XI (cannot say about other versions) as shown in this link. Here are the steps for this post.

1. Create New Action using Action Wizard

2. Add Reduce File Size Tool. Make sure you uncheck Prompt User as needed

3. Add Save tool from Save & Export. In Specify Settings make sure you have the needed settings (rename or overwrite)

4. Save the Processing Tool you created

5. You will see your tool under Actions in Tools (right side tabs)

You can Use AutoIt 3 to automate this.

Use the included recorder. Start in File manager with the first file. Enter, sleep, alt+f... Last step alt+F4, to get back to the file manager. Then Cursor down, to get to the next file.

If they are in different folders, use Windows search as the starting point.