博客 / How the Paris 2024 Olympic Games PDF planning could have weight 97% less

How the Paris 2024 Olympic Games PDF planning could have weight 97% less

Compressing a PDF can have many benefits. These benefits are increased tenfold when the document is shared on a large scale, such as the schedule for the 2024 Olympic Games.

If compressing a PDF file is a habit for some, others may wonder what it can be used for and what is the interest. The stakes are actually numerous, and of a greater magnitude than it may seem, especially for large-scale sharing via, for example, websites with a large audience or international organizations such as the Olympic Games.

The case of the PDF schedule of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games events

As you probably already know, the 2024 Olympic Games will be held in Paris. The opportunity for all the athletes who have been selected to show what they are capable of and defend the colors of their country. It is also the meeting place for all practitioners and enthusiasts, wishing to attend, on site or remotely, this spectacular sporting event which only takes place once every 4 years.

To allow enthusiasts to organize themselves during these x months of competition, a PDF schedule can be downloaded from the 2024 Olympics website. It is this one that interests us here. It interests us because on Visual PDF we allow everyone to optimize their documents. Which was clearly not done on this famous schedule! 😁

Optimization of the size of the PDF schedule

If you downloaded this PDF (on this page), like us, you may have noticed that it has a relatively large size: 18 MB! For a PDF file of a few dozen pages, containing mostly text and tables, that's a lot.

That might be a lot, but what's the deal, you might be wondering. The problem is that this file is downloadable online, and probably downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. This therefore probably represents several Terra Bytes of download. It is enormous ! Such a quantity of data has a significant impact on several aspects:

on the bandwidth of the Internet network: the bandwidth of a network is not unlimited! Even if a few Terra Bytes represent only a tiny proportion of the capacities of standard networks, an accumulation of such files (PDF or other) generates a much less negligible impact. This results in a decrease in the speed of data transition on the Internet network.
on your mobile Internet package: on a small package with, for example, 5GB of Internet per month, this file alone represents 0.3% of your monthly download capacity. Also, some mobile plans have a lower Internet quota abroad, which will be the case for many spectators during the Olympics. In this case, the previous observation is even more important. This can even cost Internet users money, when you know that the cost of a MB downloaded outside the package can reach several cents, the PDF schedule for the Olympics can cost more than €1 on its own in this case!
environmental: the Internet network consumes (a lot of) energy. The more "heavy" the data passing through the network, the more energy the network will require. To save energy, it is therefore preferable to optimize the size of all data on the Internet! (Images, videos, PDF, web pages...)
on the file download time, especially on a medium or low quality network. On an overloaded or low quality network, which will be very likely during an event such as the Olympics, you will not be able to download the PDF schedule quickly. It would be a shame if you are in a hurry!
on the impossibility of transferring the document to your relatives on certain email platforms. Most email clients have a size limit for files sent as attachments, of the order of a few MB. This prevents you from sharing the file without having to compress it on your own or using a platform specialized in file sharing.

How to reduce the size of a PDF file

The solution to reduce the size of the PDF schedule for the 2024 Olympic Games was very simple! 😁 With just a few clicks, it could have saved a lot of bandwidth, energy and internet mobile plan.

Here are the 3 simple steps to follow on the Visual PDF PDF file compression tool:

import one or more PDF documents
choose a compression level. Visual PDF offers you 3 levels...
launch the compression and recover your PDFs with a reduced size. It only takes a few seconds!

And There you go ! It's as simple and quick as that. Do the test yourself with the schedule of the Olympic Games: we obtain, with a simple compression (ie without impacting the quality of the PDF), a size gain of 97% (from 18MB to 551KB). If you don't have time to do this test, still take the time to compress your documents the next time you need to transfer them! 🙂

Wrap up

The case of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games schedule is unfortunately only one example among many others. While some mainstream organizations and companies (which therefore receive a lot of traffic on the Internet) have thought about optimizing the size of their PDFs put online (or, even better, their complete websites), many still do not do so. 3 very simple steps are however sufficient on our Visual PDF compression tool to reduce the impact on many aspects such as the environment, download time and your mobile Internet plan.

For next time, you know what you have to do! 😁

Edit

Since the writing of this article, the PDF schedule file has been updated. It now weights 3.7MB, which is obviously much better than the previous 18MB. But that still can be compressed by 50% with our PDF compression tool! 😉