where is "save as compressed pdf"??

Yes, this is not in 10.5.x

On mine, if I go to Print in any application, then click the PDF drop-down menu, one of the options is "Compress PDF". Perhaps this is simply a relic of my Tiger updating?

This has driven me nuts as well - made it very difficult to post to my classes in Blackboard (sigh).

I found an answer. Turns out in Leopard, the ability to compress pdf files resides in Preview now.

Here's how they describe how to do it:

To compress a PDF file:

Open Preview, in your Applications folder.

Choose File > Open, select the PDF file to compress, and then click Open.

Choose File > Save As, choose Reduce File Size from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu, and choose a name and location for the new PDF file.

Click Save.

This info can be found at the Mac OS X 10.5 Help page as follows:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/9021.html

I just tried it - it converted an ugly 11.5 MB pdf into a swan-like 972 kB file (whew!).

My students will be happy indeed.

Hope this helps,

Paul

You can choose the amount of compression. You will need to go to the ColorSync Utility, make a copy of the Reduce File Size filter, and set it as you would like.

If you want this to work as before, you can make an Automator workflow that will use that filter to reduce the file size and add that to the PDF menu.

OK, I see what you mean about less than adequate quality on some of the images and words. My own writing on the power point slides comes out clear, but some of the writing associated with some of the images came out less than stellar.

Colorsync was almost beyond my grade level, but I was able (finally) to put a protocol together to make a “filter” that would compress but not as much.

Below are the steps I took; its not quite so bad, and hope this works,

Paul

Steps to alter compression of pdf files

1. Use spotlight to find and open Colorsync Utility

2. For me it opened to “Profile First Aid Log”; you don’t want this; instead,
Click on Filters on the list of icons on the top (has a red, green and blue filter appearance, next to calculator on right)

3. The 7th line down reads “Reduce File Size”; click on button on the far right

4. Click on “Duplicate Filter” on the menu that pops up
This creates a new line at the bottom of the menu that reads
“Reduce File Size Copy”

5. Click on the left button next to “Reduce File Size Copy”
Several items should come up including one called “image compression”

6. Click the left button next to “Image compression”
You should see a line that reads “Quality”

7. Push the quality button to the right of the word “Quality” to the far right.

You are now done creating an altered colorsync profile.

To compress a pdf, you then

1. Open the pdf file using Preview

2. Click on “File”, then “Save As”

3. In the section that says “Quartz Filter”, click on the blue button on the right

4. Click on the line that reads “Reduce File Size Copy” (this is what you have created from above)

5. Before pressing “Save”, be sure to rename your file to something new in the “Save as” box at the top (e.g., change from “File” to “File compressed”)

6. Press Save.

Doing it this way, I converted a 10.4 MB pdf into a 2.2 MB pdf.

Some of the figures were still a tad blurry, but it was better.

If I used the original filtering, I got a file that was 612 KB. Writing on the figures was a tad worse.

And yes, it was a lot easier and nicer when “compress pdf” was a feature of Power Point.

I have also noticed this. I just switched to Mac and in general the pdfs I create are 10 times larger than the ones I created with Acrobat on my PC, which make them rather useless. As example, I converted a postscript file into pdf, and the size increased 15 times, where as the size decreased when done with acrobat. "reduce file size" does not change anything (it is my feeling it just compresses bitmap images). I decided to get Acrobat for the Mac. But I wish there were a solution without acrobat.

Agreed re Acrobat - I just used my version of Acrobat Professional to convert the pdfs into something smaller. The quality of the writing on the images was significantly better than working through Preview. Acrobat Pro also gives you a couple of options for quality. Its set to medium and this worked fine for one of my files, taking a 10 MB pdf and making it 1.6 MB with excellent quality. On another, a 30 MB file (I know, I should be able to do this better) had to be compressed using the "high" compression option, producing a 3 MB pdf - and again, the images and writing on the images were good.

Paul