Duplicate PDF pages without blowing up the file size

You can duplicate pages in preview by opening up the sidebar to display thumbnails (View->Thumbnails), click on the page you want to duplicate, and then hold down Option and drag the thumbnail to the new location. That will create a duplicate of the page and leave it at the new location. When you do it this way, it does NOT duplicate the internal images and assets, but will reference them on the new page. I just confirmed with a one-page PDF which had a 400k scanned image: I turned it into a 6-page document which was still around 400k.

If you instead add the page you wish to duplicate with Edit->Insert->Page From File... it loads all the assets again and does not reference the ones you'd already loaded, causing the file size to balloon. It would certainly be nice if it could recognize that the assets are the same, but alas.

MS Word 2008 will do it, the same will work with Scribus 1.4.3.

With Scribus all you have to do is click the "Save as Pdf" icon and then select your options, I used pdf v 1.5 and 300dpi for the graphic. The size of the 1 page pdf was the same as the graphic itself, and the 62 page version was the same size.

Here is how I tested, I have a 2011 Macbook pro running osx 10.8.5 with MS word 2008.

I created a file in word with some text and an image which was originally 2.8 Mb.

I saved this in docx and doc format and pdf format with the save as command from within word. Then I also did a pdf print from the print menu.

I then copied the page 62 times and got the following results:

Original image 2.8 Mb

One page document

• 2008 word saved docx file 2.9 Mb
• 2008 word saved doc file 2.8 Mb
• 2008 word saved pdf file 12.7 Mb
• print to pdf via word 2.8 Mb

62 page document

• 2008 word saved docx file 2.9 Mb
• 2008 word saved doc file 169.5 Mb
• 2008 word saved pdf file 774.9 Mb
• print to pdf via word 2.8 Mb