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jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Reduce PDF file size : free Acrobat replacement for Leopard

*Well, at least this fits my need*, which to be able to email PDFs of my iWork or Office presentations with both :
*+ acceptable quality*
*+ acceptable file size*

It uses the poorly documented Quartz filtering ability for PDFs in Preview. There are a couple of articles I found here or elsewhere on the web, but they still don't make things simple.

You can manually edit those same settings (using Colorsync Utility) but can also benefit from my trial-and-error process and directly download from my iDisk.
After download and decompressions, *simply drag the downloaded "Filters" folder to your Library folder* (inside your user folder to install it just for this user, or at the root level of your hard disk in order to install it for all users) - And if you already have such a folder, simply copy the contents of the downloaded folder into it.

*Here are the filters :*
* http://idisk.mac.com/jcolas-Public*

Feel free to use, download, copy, use the idea ... in any way you like.

*Then, in order to create a compressed PDF with decent quality :*
+ Open your existing PDF in preview, or Print any document using "Open PDF in Preview" from the PDF pop-up menu in the Print dialog
+ Choose Save As in the File Menu (pretty easy I guess), then choose PDF as format, and one of the "Reduce to XXX dpi ..." Quartz filters, and click Save.

I included 8 settings which produce increasingly large files, with increasingly better quality.
I find the 150 dpi / average JPEG compression to be quite suitable for most purposes.

I have tried (before Leopard) PDF compression software like PDFshrink but was not satisifed with the results and interface.

These filters produce much better (better being in terms of consistency, file size and quality) than the filter Apple includes with Leopard (and maybe Tiger ?).
The Apple "Reduce file size filter" scales images by 50%, with target dimensions between 128 and 512 pixels, which can give very unusable results.

The filters I use 2 two things :
+ resample images to 75, 150, 300 or 600 dpi (I do not not if there is upsampling)
+ compress the images using Jpeg compression at average or low quality
Once installed, you can visualize, edit or copy them using Colorsync Utility (in the Applications/ Utilities folder)

As an example, using a 73 MB PDF from a 55 page Powerpoint presentation, the compressed files have the following sizes :
+ 75 dpi low quality : 2.7 MB
+ 75 dpi average quality : 3.2 MB
+ 150 dpi low quality : 4.2 MB
+ 150 dpi average quality : 5.3 MB
+ 300 dpi low quality : 7.6 MB
+ 300 dpi average quality : 10.2 MB
+ 600 dpi low quality : 16.0 MB
+ 600 dpi average quality : 20.3 MB

Voilà.
I don't think I'll be using Adobe Acrobat anytime soon.

"Thanks" a lot to Adobe for not being able to have a working version of Acrobat on Leopard until next January.
I hope many people (with needs similar to mine) will discover that they don't realy need it.

And I just wonder why Apple does not include these filters in Leopard.
Is this just in order to be nice with Adobe ?

Feedback or comments greatly appreciated.

Jérôme.

MBP 17" 2.4Ghz/4GB, Mac OS X (10.5), and other Macs too

Posted on Dec 15, 2007 3:44 AM

226 replies

Mar 10, 2013 12:56 PM in response to jerome1989

I have to say that there is something important missing here. These filters compress very well some documents (as do the Quartz filters prepacked with Preview) and they compress other documents very badly. In fact, they expand these others hugely. In my experience, I have compression success about half the time with them. Your success may vary! I'd really like to have a more rule-based tool. As in, if you have this kind of a document/OS with these characteristics, these filters will work great. If on the other hand you have one with these characteristics, it won't. If we don't understand this rule, then it's sort of black magic that may or may not work. I like tools that I can count on.

One would like to believe that there is *something* about a pdf file that makes it appropriate or inappropriate for these filters. I do find it rather striking that when a compression filter doesn't work, it grossly expands a file. You'd think that if it didn't work, it just wouldn't do anything at all.

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Mar 10, 2013 1:04 PM in response to yiannis.

Hi Yiannis.

Do you confirm that you get a 4x bigger file (from non-compressed scanned PDFs, e.g. scans from OS X) after:

- exporting using to PDF using the "Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION" filter,

- then opening the resulting PDF file (not the original scanned PDF) and export it using the compressed PDF using the "JPEG compression - STANDARD" filter?

yiannis.

Level 1

0 points

Mar 10, 2013 2:30 PM in response to jerome1989

Yeap. In fact, it's x5.

-Initial file: 54 MB

-Exporting using 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION: 223 MB

-Exporting the resulting file using JPEG compression - STANDARD: 274 MB

Mar 10, 2013 4:08 PM in response to yiannis.

i reported an issue where these trashed all the color data on some of my professionally prepared pdf's. i don't know the technical details involved in what one would have to not downsample with these but despite the heroic effort on the OP's part (a big thank you) it is very weird that i cannot create pdf's on the mac without gargantuan size or custom scripting.

i cluttered up a whole 1 TB drive creating pdf's when i first ported to mac.

anyway, for those on a deadline to get something out across the internet - downloading the most recent version of acrobat as a demo version and simply saving as a reduced size pdf should do the trick for you...

Apr 13, 2013 10:08 PM in response to jerome1989

Hi Jerome!

I just want to Thank You for taking the time to thoroughly explaining how to reduce our scanned PDF File sizes and for providing us a link to the Quartz Filters.

I downloaded your Filter Folder and have a question I was hoping you could help me with. In your initial post you say:

Choose Save As in the File Menu (pretty easy I guess), then choose PDF as format, and one of the "Reduce to XXX dpi ..." Quartz filters, and click Save.

I have an issue halfway through that instruction. In "Preview" when I click "Save As" and then choose PDF as the format, the "Quartz Filter" comes up with eight options in the drop down menu, one of those options is "Reduce File Size". However, I do not have the option to "Reduce to XXX dpi...". The issue is that when I select "Reduce File Size" I believe it is reducing it to such a small dpi such that my PDF file is blurry/too small of a file. Can you please let me know what I am doing wrong or if you can help me at all?

I truly appreciate all your time and effort. Thank you!

Karen

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Apr 15, 2013 9:04 AM in response to Toronto.Girl

Hi Karen.

FIrst, thanks for your nice words 🙂

"Reduce File Size" is the standard OS X filter.

You have probably not put the filters in the right location.

Here is the appropriate location, if your startup disk's name is "Macintosh HD". If it is different, just replace "Macintosh HD" with the name of your Startup disk.

If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.7.x or10.8.x) then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services". This folder should already exist and contain files. Once you put the downloaded filters there, you should have for example one file with the following path:

"Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"

If you are running an earlier vesion of OS X (10.6.x or earlier), then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/Filters" and you should have for example one file with the following path:

"Macintosh HD/Library/Filters/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"

Hope this helps and have a great day,

Jérôme.

Apr 15, 2013 10:37 AM in response to jerome1989

Dear Jérôme,

You are amazing! Thank you sooooo much for your prompt and very detailed response. I followed your advice and your filters work perfectly now! Again I truly appreciate all of your help and you have been so helpful throughout this whole thread for many others.

Have a wonderful start to your week!

Karen

MathisB

Level 1

8 points

Apr 16, 2013 1:11 AM in response to jerome1989

I don't know how you do it but I always have problems with the quartz filters. I also find it quite a hassle to do the settings every time. Now my son introduced me to http://smallpdf.com - It gave me a 92% compression and I was happy. Maybe it's nothing for you more advanced folks but it worked nicely for me.

Let me know if you get the same compression rates...

Apr 16, 2013 2:01 AM in response to jerome1989

Hi Jerome, I get a server is not available message trying to download the filters. Do I do something wrong?

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Apr 16, 2013 2:08 AM in response to MathisB

Hi Mathis.

smallpdf.com looks very simple (very clean interface !) and can be a great solution for some. Thanks!

2 remarks regarding your post though:

- What do you mean by "I also find it quite a hassle to do the settings every time" ? The purpose of these filters is not to have to manually edit settings every time you want to compress a PDF?

- smallpdf.com looks great. You should not be ashamed. And it would be much nicer and honest if you said in your various posts (this is your sicth post about smallpdf.com on Apple discussion) that you are the creator of smallpdf.com, don't you think :-) ??

This is especially true since you ask people to upload their personal files to your site and there is no "who we are" section on smallpdf.com. Moreover, since you appear as the site owner on whois pages or your facebook page, there is really no point in not saying it here.

I tried 2 files on smallpdf.com.

The first (a 1 page scan) was nicely compressed the appears that smallpdf.com compresses the image within the PDF to 200dpi and the result (70% reduction) was a tad bigger than with the "STANDARD" filter in this post (74% reduction)

The second (a 8.6MB, 63 pages PPT presentation exported to PDF from PPT2011) did not go through (I got the "Compressing PDF" wheel forever). This is one of the "problematic" PDFs that produced a larger output when exported with the filters discussed here.

I'd be glad to help you debug (via email, and since your email is on the smallpdf.com whois page, I should have no problem sending you one :-)

Take care,

Jérôme.

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Apr 16, 2013 2:13 AM in response to David Rietveld

Hi David.

This discussion was created a few years ago, by the time of MobileMe.

MobileMe doesn't work anymore and so does the original link.

Here is a Dropbox link, which works: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41548940/PDF%20compression%20filters%20%28Un zip%20and%20put%20in%20your%20Library%20folder%29.zip

Feel also free to re-distribute / re-post freely.

Take care,

Jérôme.

Apr 16, 2013 2:18 AM in response to jerome1989

Thanks, just need to find out where to place this. I saw some conversation about this from you.. Just checking.. 10.8.3

Your fast!! (Ps I liked your reply on the shrinkpdf or something! Very smart..)

MathisB

Level 1

8 points

Apr 16, 2013 2:18 AM in response to jerome1989

Hi Jerome!

Thanks for the long reply!

And you are right, the filters for download are fantastic and solve probably most people's problems. Great how active you are on this! High respects! :-)

Well, when I told on another mac forum about the product to help someone solve a very simple compression, I was banned from the forum and I don't want to risk this here as well. Therefore, it seemed better to me not to be to direct here - sorry for deceiving 🙂

You have some great points and I would like to discuss it with you. Please send me an email. I would highly appreciate it.

Thanks again for the kind reply. :-)