I have been importing single page tiff scans and converting them to PDF and OCRing them. When I go to merge pages back into a single document the file size is almost 3X the size of the separate files. I want to be able to search and pull all pages f a document at once. Is there a better way to accomplish this without taking up all the extra room? is it better to use groups? is there a way to reduce the file size after merging. I know I can open in acrobat and do that, but that would not be very convenient for thousands of documents.
This issue has been mentioned a number of times.
When a PDF is edited under Preview or DEVONthink and the file is then saved, it will probably be larger than the original file resulting from OCR to searchable PDF.
Apple’s PDFKit code is used for the edit/save and isn’t very efficient as to resulting file size.
If you can figure out how to generate multipage TIFFs or PDFs from the scanner output you will end up with smaller searchable PDFs.
Another option would be to use a third-party application such as PDF Shrink to reduce the file size. A custom shrink set can usually be created that retains acceptable view/print quality while significantly reducing file size.