Eli5. How does a PDF compressor work? How does it give the same quality, with lower size?

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I compressed a PDF file that was around 95 MB, and the online compressor compressed it to only 1.15 MB, but when I viewed the file it still has a great, almost exact same quality.

In: Technology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

ELI5:

When you make a collage of letters and words and images on a page of paper with some items on top of others, there can be a lot of messy mistakes and cuts and pieces of tape hanging out.

If you put the collage on a photocopier, you get a nice clean picture of the collage, no folds or creases or tears or tape sticking out.

Slightly more complex, but slightly more accurate, because I don’t think OP is actually 5:

“Recompressing” a PDF is similar – it can discard items that are duplicated or not used anymore. It can also use other compression methods to reduce the size of an image inside a PDF, or lossless compression methods to squeeze the size of text.

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