Multivalent Tools: PDF Uncompact

## PDF Uncompact

### Users

Uncompact rewrites PDF files from Compact PDF format into standard PDF format. To use, simply double click on the `Uncompact.jar` file and select the PDFs to uncompact from the file selection box. Alternatively, it can be run from the command line: `java -jar Uncompact.jar PDF-files`. The uncompressed version of the PDF, which relaces the Compact PDF version, is the same size as the original PDF before Compact-ification.

### Publishers

The Compress tool can produce the highly compressed Compact PDF format. Compact PDF is often much smaller than what can be produced by Adobe's PDF 1.5 definition, or by any general-purpose compressor such as Flate/gzip or RAR. At this time Compact files can be directly viewed in Multivalent Browser and manipulated by the Multivalent PDF tools, but not by other PDF software.

Uncompact is distributed as a free, small (xxK) package so that publishers can save bandwidth or disk space on CD by distributing documents in the highly compressed Compact PDF format, and users can conveniently uncompress them. This is similar to distributing files compressed as `.zip` or `.gz` or `.rar`, and requiring a separate uncompressor. In this case, the uncompressor is tuned to PDF and can deliver much smaller file sizes on many classes of PDF, and furthermore the uncompressor is written in Java, so it runs Solaris, Linux, Macintosh OS X, Windows, and elsewhere. Compress -old.

Works great for large documents, especially books that are mostly text.

| Original Size (bytes) | gzip | .zip | Compact PDF
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Practical File System Design | 1156619 | 1004934 | 1005079 | 571882 (50%)
Java Developers Journal Vol 8, Num |
Real World Go Live | 18,530,903 | 15,692,402 |  | 12,800,412 (30%)
pdfxguide.pdf | 10,243,070 | 8,325,458 |  | 4,385,093 (57%)
Manning JDK 1.4 | 10,168,352 | 8,871,949 |  | 2,999,054 (70%)

### Technical Note

Compact PDF can also be uncompressed with the PDF Compress tool in the Multivalent Document Tools suite with the following command:

> `java.tool.pdf.Compress -force -inplace PDF-file`

which, because lacks -compact flag, writes in standard PDF format.