Here’s a simple method I recently discovered for shrinking the size of PDF’s on a Mac. It was able to convert a 5MB PDF down to 800k while maintaining perfectly readable quality. The key is to re-save the PDF applying a quartz filter to compress the images. Here’s the steps to make it work:
- Open your Colorsync Utility, click on the “Filters” tab and duplicate the one called “Reduce File Size.”
- You’ll want to bump up the quality a bit from the default on that preset- I found the following settings to be about right to achieve a 1/6th reduction in file size while preserving readability:
- Now close out of the colorsync utility and open up one of your bloated PDFs. Choose the File > Save As option and on the save dialogue apply the quartz filter you just set up.
This has been helpful in shrinking down PDF’s that come out of my scanner. The document scanner I have (Canon MP830) is neat because it has an automatic document feeder and the ability to turn a big document into a PDF on my desktop by pushing a single button, but for whatever reason the lowest resolution setting still produces these massive files. I looked around and found various open source programs that would do the same thing but the quartz filter mechanism built into Mac OS X works perfectly and requires no extra software. Thanks to the good people on this forum for pointing out this handy technique.
[...] It turns out that the default approach to creating PDFs isn’t very smart! Sure they’ll be beautiful and hi-res and all that, but they’re too fucking big! A wee bit of squirelling around found me the answer and so here you go … it all comes down to previewing in Preview and then saving a PDF with an appropriate Quartz filter. Here’s a post on the Apple Support site with some pre-done filters, and here’s another blog post which explains about how to create more filters yourself. [...]
Thank you very much!
I had looking for this tip a lot.
@Dave & Jojo, holy ingratitude… this post is 3yrs old (look at the date in the URL). I have no idea what version my OS was at the time. You're welcome for steering you to the mechanism that allows you to optimize PDF's (even if the specifics of the process are slightly different now). jeeesh, tough crowd…
Sean
No ingratitude. Just thought you'd like to keep your page up-to-date.
On the internet, nothing ever expires…
Dave