Sort of. Not always - it depends on what you use to optimise it. Acrobat 4 does a pretty good job of removing dead stuff, it depends on how it is set up. You can still figure out what to remove fairly easily, you just have to remove the end of the table, not all of it.
I've been working with PDF for a while now -- basically PDF has been designed to allow modifications to be made to a file without having to rewrite the entire thing (useful if you have a thousand page document and you want to correct one typo). At the bottom of every PDF file there are several cross-referencing tables. Open up a PDF file in [your favourite text editor here] and scroll to the bottom, you'll see what I mean. In what's called an 'incremental' PDF file (one that's been updated) there are several of these cross-referencing tables. It is safe to assume that the last one (or possibly more) is the one with the black boxes. You can simply delete the last table and the items will be ignored. In theory you also have to change a few other numbers but if you don't mind a few error messages you can get away with almost anything if you're using Acrobat Reader to view the document. You do not even need to go through and work out where all the black boxes are...
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Sort of. Not always - it depends on what you use to optimise it. Acrobat 4 does a pretty good job of removing dead stuff, it depends on how it is set up. You can still figure out what to remove fairly easily, you just have to remove the end of the table, not all of it.
I've been working with PDF for a while now -- basically PDF has been designed to allow modifications to be made to a file without having to rewrite the entire thing (useful if you have a thousand page document and you want to correct one typo). At the bottom of every PDF file there are several cross-referencing tables. Open up a PDF file in [your favourite text editor here] and scroll to the bottom, you'll see what I mean. In what's called an 'incremental' PDF file (one that's been updated) there are several of these cross-referencing tables. It is safe to assume that the last one (or possibly more) is the one with the black boxes. You can simply delete the last table and the items will be ignored. In theory you also have to change a few other numbers but if you don't mind a few error messages you can get away with almost anything if you're using Acrobat Reader to view the document. You do not even need to go through and work out where all the black boxes are...