Convert Microsoft Word to PDF of minimal file size

Question

I am aware of some Microsoft Word to PDF converters and have been using MS word itself to do this. But I am wondering if there's any conversion tool that produces the PDF files as small in file size as possible? For example, I have a Word document for my resume being 43KB, which was converted to a PDF file of 385KB. It would be better if the size can be smaller.

EDIT: Here is an example, including an original Word docx (115KB) and a converted PDF file (452KB). I used Word 2016 to export the docx file to the PDF. Please download the sample here: https://app.box.com/s/gk3vvdcy16t4avn6gy0yyyyvjja5y9ag

Personally I think it's the font of the title and the text effect of the headings that somehow increase the size of the transformed PDF file.

Answer 1

Consider using the LEADTOOLS ePrint virtual printer driver and file converter (https://www.eprintdriver.com/). You can select one or more Word files and "print" them to a virtual PDF printer. Using this, I was able to obtain a PDF output of size smaller than your PDF output.

If you are a programmer creating your own application, you could also consider using the LEADTOOLS Document Conversion SDK (https://www.leadtools.com/sdk/document/document-converter). The code looks like this:

var jobData = DocumentConverterJobs.CreateJobData(inputWordFile, "outputFile.pdf", DocumentFormat.Pdf);
jobData.JobName = "conversion job";
documentConverter.Jobs.RunJob(documentConverter.Jobs.CreateJob(jobData));

Disclaimer: I am an employee of this software’s vendor.

Answer 2

I've used CutePDF Writer (free) (http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp) for years, as I've found it to produce consistently good results with small file sizes. Highly recommend it if you haven't tried it. Using CutePDF, I too was able to get a smaller PDF file than the one in your document upload (366KB).

Answer 3

I use PDFCreator precisely for this reason - the output is much smaller than anything from Word. I also like it because it's free, and no cloud is involved so I can run even confidential materials though it. I find the way it works very easy too, it's just another printer on the system.

Answer 4

I am using PDF WIZ (https://www.starzsoft.com/pdf-converter/), a 100% free offline PDF converter that can help convert PDF to Word or Word to PDF without any feature limit.