I have an old copy of Adobe Acrobat 4.0. Recently, I found that I needed to scan a document, so I can have a digital copy of it on hand for work. The document is about 300 pages, and after scanning 80% of the document, I have found that my pdf file is getting to be close to two gigs in size. Rather than rescan the document with lower resolution, I am looking for a way to alter the resolution of the graphics in the existing pdf. Is there a way of doing this in adobe acrobat 4.0?
I don’t have a pat answer but some food for thought. It sounds like you are creating the PDF with every page of the original as an image. If this document is not primarily images, you may be better off running OCR on the images to generate text, although I am unsure of the effort necessary to do that and then recreate a PDF from it. It may be more than you are willing to do in that it might be as time-consuming as rescanning, which you are trying to avoid.
While I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you on taking apart the existing PDF (In fact I asked basically the same question about a week and a half ago), considering ~240 pages at 1MB per page would be 240MB, that puts your document at roughly 8MB per page. Whether that is too high or not depends on the material being scanned and your intended use of it. Are these full color detailed contour maps or line drawings with a limited number of colors? What scanner settings are you using?