Tips on reducing PDF file size?

Question

Level 1

119 points

Tips on reducing PDF file size?

I can't seem to export PDFs smaller than 5 MB from Pages. The docs I'm exporting are only one or two pages in length with one small raster image and a few vectors. Exporting to PDF even at loweset "Good" quality produces a 5 MB file.

Things I've tried:

The "Reduce File Size" option in Pages before exporting doesn't work––it sits forever at "Calculating file savings..." and never does anything.
Using the Compress PDF Workflow: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/compresspdfworkflow.html
This takes a 5 MB file and "compresses" it to 5.5 MB. Fail.
Using the "Compress PDF" Quartz filter when saving from Preview. Again, it actually makes the files larger, not smaller.

These files should be, at most, 1 MB. Any tips you have on shrinking PDF size from Pages would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

-i-

Macbook Pro 2.8GHz, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Jun 2, 2011 2:13 PM

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Answer 1

Jun 2, 2011 5:34 PM in response to Ian Patterson

-i-,

You're right, the document you described doesn't seem like one that would be 5MB in size. My suggestion would be to make a copy to experiment on and try taking one element out of the document at a time until you find out what part of the document is running up the memory requirement.

Jerry

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Answer 2

Jun 2, 2011 9:02 PM in response to Ian Patterson

Ian

If you like click on my blue name and email me the Pages document and the pdf and I'll see what you can do and what the problem is.

Peter

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Answer 3

Ian Patterson Author

Level 1

119 points

Jun 6, 2011 8:00 PM in response to Jerrold Green1

Thanks, I was able to identify the large element by deleting one element at a time and then exporting to PDF to check the size. Apparently one element that should have been quite a small vector was taking up nearly 4.2 MB. Thanks for your ideas.

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Answer 4

Jun 6, 2011 9:08 PM in response to Ian Patterson

If you got that vector from Illustrator, Indesign or Quark Xpress, a common mistake is to leave hidden, masked or covered objects in the file.

I got a fairly simple pdf from a NY library which was way bigger than it should have been. When I examined it, I found they had masked out a tiny portion of a large graphic and then duplicated everything on top of itself!

You'd think they'd take one look at the result and guess something weird was going on.

Peter

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