Is it possible to uncompress PDF by using Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Distiller?

Question

Most PDF files found on the Web have compressed and unreadable data streams. Is it possible to uncompress the internal content of a PDF file using Acrobat or Acrobat Distill

Answer 1

qpdf and pdftk have already been mentioned. To show the commands:

$ qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable orig.pdf uncompressed-orig.pdf
$ pdftk orig.pdf output uncompressed-orig.pdf uncompress

mutool however hasn't been mentioned yet:

$ mutool clean -d -a orig.pdf uncompressed-orig.pdf

mutool is a command line tool which ships alongside the lightweight MuPDF PDF + document viewer.

I do not think you can achieve the uncompressing of PDF objects' streams with Acrobat or Distiller (unless you have additional payware plugins available).