Optimize PDFs for Fast Web Viewing with Linearize PDF

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PDF documents can be optimized to support a wide range of different use cases, ensuring a consistent and reliable experience for users when viewing documents online, printing to paper, or protecting and preserving information. Unfortunately, there isn't one magic set of changes that will improve a PDF for all usage — different optimizations must be applied based on the intended usage. The ISO 32000 specification is robust, and it can be challenging to ensure your documents are aligned with your needs. If your goal is to support the best online viewing experience, you're going to want to linearize your PDFs.

Linearization is the process of reformatting PDF content to be arranged in a linear order, which enable PDF files to be viewed faster over an internet connection. Linearized PDFs include information that allow for byte-streaming servers to download one page at a time, supporting page-by-page loading and viewing of content. When PDFs are not linearized, files must be downloaded in their entirety before any content can be loaded or viewed on screen, which can be considerably slower for larger documents with many pages. You may be familar with the "Fast Web View" setting that can be manually applied to PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. This is another name for exactly the same process — enabling "Fast Web View" applies linearization to a PDF.

If you are looking to automate a workflow, batch process documents, or apply linearization within your application, you'll need a reliable tool that's easy to learn and integrate. pdfRest API Toolkit offers a Linearize PDF API Tool, which uses the same technology from Adobe to optimize a PDF for Fast Web View in the form of a REST API service that's callable from anywhere.

Code Example | Load this into API Lab↗

        curl -X POST "https://api.pdfrest.com/linearized-pdf" \ 
        -H "Accept: application/json" \ 
        -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" \
        -H "Api-Key: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx" \
        -F "file=@PATH_TO_FILE/pdfRest.pdf" \ 
        -F "output=pdfRest_linearized" \

Linearize PDF