title: Reduce image size (bytes) in ITextPDF
body: <p>I'm using the itext PDF library to build a very image-intensive PDF document in Java. Each page has a dozen images on it. The original source images are very high resolution, and I'm using <code>scaleToFit</code> to render the image to the size I need.</p>
  
  <p>The problem I have is that the PDF document is still very large. My understanding is that the entire original high resolution image is being included, and the scaling I'm using only affects the actual rendering, not the size of the image that's included in the file.</p>
  
  <p>I've verified this by removing the scaling — the pages were rendered with the high resolution images overlapping each other and the edge of pages, and the PDF was the same size as when the scaling was in place.</p>
  
  <p>So, here's the question — how can I reduce the size of the PDF file by scaling down each image? If I lose a little bit of image quality that's ok. Rescaling the source images manually will be difficult.</p>