censhare offers you the possibility to reduce the size of PDF. This can be done manually by you or automatically. 

Context

The Downsize PDF feature is available within censhare Web and censhare Client. 

Prerequisites

The Downsize PDF feature has to be configured by your censhare administrator first. It can only be used for assets whose master file has the MIME type PDF document.

Introduction

There are different use cases when PDFs are imported into or created by censhare. One example is a PDF at the end of a magazine's production process. These PDFs can be extremely large and may require smaller PDFs. This may only apply to certain users or workflows. A smaller PDF reduces traffic when content is exchanged with other systems or published on a media portal. Otherwise, transfer might take too long.

For these reasons, censhare provides for downsizing PDFs within censhare Web and censhare Client. You can choose the action manually for every asset that has a PDF as master file with the PDF document MIME type.

Your censhare administrator might have configured that PDFs are downsized automatically. For example, this can happen if you assign a certain workflow step or a certain user group as workflow target to a PDF asset. If this is true, you will notice after the conversion that a new Downsized PDF file attached to the asset.

Your administrator can also define that the automatic conversion is only done if the PDF exceeds a certain file size. For the manual action, there is no such limitation intended.

You cannot influence the parameters for the conversion yourself. This has to be done by your administrator. Besides that, you share the same parameters with all other users.    

Please be aware, that the result of the downsized PDF depends on the original PDF. Not every PDF is equally suited for downsizing. Depending on the PDF, the result may even be larger than the origin. 

Note: The Downsize PDF feature is a simple solution for your basic needs. If you need a solution with a broad range of functionality, connect the censhare system to a respective external solution.

Downsizing PDF

You can start the PDF downsize from different pages and for one or more assets:    

  • for the asset currently open in an asset page.

  • from a search result page. From here, you can select one or more PDF assets. When you select more than one, you can carry out the action for all of them at once. If one or more of the selected assets do not have the PDF document MIME type, the action will not be available.

Depending on the size of the PDFs and the amount of files to convert, the calculation might take some time.

Start the downsize

  1. Select the PDF asset(s) to be downsized from a search result list, or open the required asset in an asset page.

  2. From the Page actions, select Downsized PDF.    

The downsize is started. You are notified by a pop-up if the downsize was successful or if it failed:

  • If it is successful, you find the downsized PDF on the File widget of the Overview tab where you can download it.

  • If it fails, see If the Downsize PDF process fails.    

Download the downsized PDF

To download the downsized PDF:

  1. Open the respective asset(s), if not already open.

  2. Go to the Files widget.

  3. Select the entry and choose the Download file action.

Search for downsized PDFs

When censhare has calculated the downsized PDF from the master file of an asset, the new file will receive the pdf-downsize file type. You can use this file type to search for all assets that have a downsized PDF attached.

  1. Click the Search icon in the top navigation and select Expert search.

  2. Click the upper "+" icon and select File type as search parameter in the new field.

  3. Select Downsized PDF as search value and click SEARCH.

If the Downsize PDF process fails

The downsizing process may fail for several reasons, for example:

  • Something might have gone wrong with the conversion of the PDF itself.

  • Something might have gone wrong with the configuration of the downsize functionality.

Conversion issues

If the conversion of the PDF fails, censhare will inform you about that within a notification window as follows: 

"Downsizing failed" and displays the name of the asset for which the conversion failed. At the bottom, a Retry button shows up. For each asset where the conversion failed, there will be a separate notification window.

A typical reason for a failure can be: You have started the Downsize PDF server action for an asset that is edited and therefore locked. So, to reconcile the problem, for example, save and close the asset to remove the lock and start the conversion again. In this case, you can use the Retry button in the notification window. You do not have to call the Downsize PDF entry within the asset respective page action menu.    

Configuration issues

If there is a configuration problem, a different notification window will be shown: Downsize PDF and more information about the problem is displayed. For example, if the server action does not find the respective configuration asset, the windows contain the information: "Configuration asset not found". In this case, contact your administrator.

Result

For the selected assets, an additional Downsized PDF file has been created and attached to the respective asset. The centrally defined parameters in censhare have been used for the calculation of the PDFs.