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I have deployed a watermark to an existing pdf file using the method detailed in the answer to this question: How to append PDF pages using PyPDF2

However, during this merge process, the size of the pdf at least doubles and often almost trebles in size (for reference from around 10MB to almost 30MB) depending on the watermark that I deploy. I need to keep the size much closer to the original size of the pdfs.

Is there a way to achieve this during the merge process? or if not, is there a method that I can deploy via PyPDF2 or any other python package to reduce the size of the file considerably?

I have searched around, but cannot find a reasonable solution at the moment (other than potentially manually reducing the size via the Adobe software). This is not an appropriate solution though, since I need to reduction to be automated.

Also, out of interest, specifically given the fact that the watermark is a fraction of the size of the original pdf, howcome the file more than doubles in size?

I have not detailed any specific code here (other than indirectly through the linked question and answer) since it does not seem necessary. Though, if further information is required, please let me know!

Thank you!

agftrading
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The key problem is that if you are watermarking n pages using mergePage, it is likely bringing in n copies of the watermark page's resources into the document rather than re-using 1 copy of the watermark n times. N copies of a font or image resource gets to be significant overhead. I am not seeing a way to work around this in PyPDF2. My company, Datalogics, does offer a PDFOptimizer product that could be automated to remove the redundant resources.

Patrick Gallot
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