Reduce PDF size

[jerry]

PDF files printed by Lacerte are ridiculously large.  A 1 page e-filing confirmation letter is 1 MB, which Acrobat can reduce down to  12k.  When you have a lot of clients, and are emailing out 1 MB at a time, it really eats up email server space.  And a tax return reduces down 10x when I optimize in Acrobat.

If Acrobat can optimize and make these files 10-100x smaller, so can Lacerte.

[CPA4Biz]

Absolutely agree.  This has been going on for years!

[WJCPA]

I agree!  I keep asking support and they keep telling me it is a setting in my pdf writer and should talk to my IT support.  That is not an accurate answer.  It is almost embarrassing to send a pdf to a client.  

[JCL]

In agreement. I wind up printing to my own PDF printer with settings optimized for file reduction. This is one extra, unnecessary step.

[RDYCPA]

So agree!

[DatabaseRobert]

If you can still get it, the "Debenu PDF Automation" software is excellent. You can tell it to "watch that folder over there" (where all of your PDFs get printed to), have a script to strip out all of the font information that is not needed, and then put the (now much smaller) resulting PDFs into a finished product directory.
We have been successfully shrinking our Lacerte printouts--typically a 3MB tax return or Organizer comes back at about half that size, 1 to 1.5MB--for a half-dozen years since we found this excellent utility.

I believe someone (FoxIt?) bought Debenu, and they are currently in the process of sunsetting the old software. It will no longer be supported, and probably not sold, which is why I said "if you can get it".
My recollection is that they have plans to likely do what Adobe did: they no longer sell you Acrobat, they *lease* its use to use.

Robert Kirk
LTUGtools

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the idea. We are changing the status to "Open for voting" since it is no longer considered "New". If you have any questions on the life cycle of an idea, check out our Idea Getting Started Guide for more information.

[WJCPA]

Can anyone think of a reason why anyone would not want smaller PDFs?  Why does this even need to be put to a vote?

[kgreen8393]

I still have a few 2021 Partnership returns with Schedule K-3's that are required to be E-Filed, but currently cannot be E-Filed as Lacerte is not yet allowing the K-3, except as a pdf attachment.  The pdf attachment for the Schedule K-3 is too large due to number of partners.  Therefore these returns sit waiting for Lacerte to allow E-Filing of Schedule K-3's.  IRS opened this up at the end of March.  Therefore smaller pdf's are greatly needed.  Unfortunately, I can't get the pdf's small enough with Adobe.