Unacceptable increase in file size when docx. saved and opened in Pages

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Unacceptable increase in file size when docx. saved and opened in Pages

I'm trying to assemble a Newsletter which consists mainly of contributions that are emailed from MS users. The docx files seem to grow significantly when opened. For instance a paragraph sent to me that converted to 710kb I re-typed at 154kb. The problem with all this is that the final assembled document with a bit of presentation word processing ends up slow to send and wasteful of the internet's resources, even when exported to a pdf - this is energy after all!

What's going on and is there a "cure".

iMac 21.5", macOS 10.13

Posted on Nov 19, 2019 7:16 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Community+ 2024

Level 10

116,789 points

Nov 20, 2019 9:59 AM in response to Neil Dewey

Your only hope of keeping Pages content intact on export is PDF. Pages uses a different layout engine than MS Word, and the translation process adds to that dilemma. The Pages File menu has a Reduce Document Size… and you will have to determine if using that before exporting to PDF offers any pragmatism.

I just composed the same text content in Pages v8.2.1 and LibreOffice Writer v6.3.3.2. When both are exported to PDF, the LibreOffice exported PDF was only 2K smaller that the one exported from Pages using PDF best. Both PDF, by default are compressed binary files. LibreOffice does not use Apple's PDF library as it has its own which may give it an edge.

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Answer 2

Nov 19, 2019 7:48 AM in response to Neil Dewey

What is going on is that Pages must translate a Word document into Apple's own Pages internal (.pages) document format, and again, translate that bloat back to Word .docx on export. If you want a properly emaciated Word document, open and save it again in LibreOffice Writer.

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Answer 3

Nov 19, 2019 11:20 AM in response to Neil Dewey

I just opened 179 page Word .docx in Pages v8.2.1 on Mojave. This Word document was 156 KB on disk. The Pages translation expanded to 1MB in the .pages document. When I exported it to another Word document, that file was also 156 KB on disk.

Older versions of Pages would take a new document and by simply adding a sole capital 'A', the Pages document would save as 500 KB. The exported Word documents were huge too — until opened, and resaved in LibreOffice which resulted in a 16 KB .docx.

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Answer 4

Neil Dewey Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 20, 2019 8:55 AM in response to VikingOSX

OK... well that explains where the bloat comes from. So my first thought was complete my text and images document in Pages, hang the size and export to Word and then send to the webmaster who would add the much smaller document to the website and also attach it to a big email distribution. And then I remembered that Pages to Word messes up any formatting other than the simplest document only required to provide basic text info - not a carefully composed "graphicy" newsletter. Which is why converting to pdf keeps the formatting but unless an expensive program like Adobe Acrobat is used to compress to a usable size, all quality disappears if you use the export to pdf function in Pages.

So back to square one?

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Unacceptable increase in file size when docx. saved and opened in Pages

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