PDF size management

I'm using both v14.NET/VB.NET and v14OCX/VB6 to convert streams of incoming tiffs to multi-page PDFs in two different applications. I'm trying to keep PDF size down. I'm handling bitonal tiffs as CCITT4 and color tiffs as 24-bit jpegs. I'm using color-count to sort the images into the two categories and using quality factor to manage the jpg sizes. But the PDFs are too large and I'm having trouble balancing size and quality.

What (if any) other factors should I be looking at? What goes into PDF size determination? Am I correct in understanding that when converting a bitmap/raster into PDF, the actual image -- within the structure of the PDF (vector), is maintained as a block of raster data? Does that have any implications for determining the size of the final PDF beyond the rule that if you keep the size of the input down it will keep the size of the output down?

I know that you more typically handle questions of the "I have this problem with this snippet of code" nature, but I hope you can address this and I believe it would be valuable for other users of your product.

We try to handle all types of customer questions either here on the forums or through the support@leadtools.com email address. We also have a Premium Support option which includes phone support. For more details, please see http://www.leadtools.com...port/support-options.htm

About your question, you are right. When using the PDF Plug-in of LEADTOOLS to save PDF files, the bitmaps are encoded and embedded as raster images inside the PDF file. This means the bitmap size and compression ratio are the important factors.

The approach you're using (Group 4 for bitonal and JPEG for color) is a logical choice. If you are using JPEG 444 (YUV 4:4:4 color space), you could get smaller size with 422 or 411.

In version 14.5, a new module was introduced, which is the Advanced PDF Compression part of the PDF Plug-in. This module uses MRC segmentation to optimize the image and try to minimize size. For more information, see http://www.leadtools.com...ter/Raster-Addon-PDF.htm

You can try it by downloading the free evaluation edition of LEADTOOLS 14.5 or 15.
If you would like to ask about upgrade price, please send your serial numbers to sales@leadtools.com

There is one other option if the images contain a lot of text, which is OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Since searchable text documents are usually much smaller than images of text, OCR which converts the image back to text and can save as PDF, could be a good solution in some cases.
OCR is part of LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite and can also be tested in the evaluation edition. For more information, see http://www.leadtools.com...t/Document-Addon-OCR.htm