Office printing to PDF

Please don't shoot me!!! 😁

Jokes aside, do you mean the "Print to PDF" option in the printing dialogue is gone? Have you tried adding a virtual printer in System Preferences (see here: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2007082812233971)? Maybe you should see this, too: http://indesignsecrets.com/acrobats-adobe-pdf-printer-replaced-in-snow-leopard.p hp

Calamity Jane wrote:

It used to be so easy to control the ouput PDF in terms of resolution but now?

You don't say so, but presumably you used Adobe PDF Printer, which has been replaced by the Save as Adobe PDF command. You probably need to update your version of Adobe Acrobat (Pro) -- not necessarily upgrade; depends on which version you're using. See

<http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/509/cpsid_50981.html>

Alternatively, you could try CUPS-PDF

<https://bitbucket.org/codepoet/cups-pdf-for-mac-os-x/downloads>

Additionally, you should be aware that Preview features a PDF size reducing filter. This info is from Preview's Help file

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Preview/5.0/en/9827.html>

have you tried this link for adding cups-pdf printer?

http://www.withoutink.com/apple/how-to-install-cups-pdf-virtual-pdf-printer-in-s now-leopard/

Calamity Jane wrote:

Colleague using Windows, Word 2010, can get 3.5mb PDF using Word to PDF.

This is a tough one. I don't even use Word 2011; but the real problem is that it is very difficult to determine the cause of the size difference when one knows nothing about the files in question. Maybe theirs don't include pictures, while yours does; maybe their pics are downsampled to 96 ppi, while yours are at 300 or even 600 ppi; maybe yours are not compressed and theirs are; and on and on. Fonts, and especially advanced features, can also increase, sometimes dramatically, file sizes.

Since you have Adobe Acrobat, you should also try Acrobat's PDF file reduction (Save As… > Adobe PDF Files, Optimized > Settings…). This gives you much more control than Preview's filter, including an very useful feature, "Audit space usage…", which provides an overview of disk space used by items within the document.

Also, in Word, before printing to PDF, do a compatibility report. This might catch some problems which could contribute to the bloat.

You might also want to search/ask on the forum devoted entirely to Word problems:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macword

Calamity Jane wrote:

something called "Content Streams" uses nearly 99% of the document.

That's bad news -- content streams is what you suspect, your document's actual contents, the text and the tables. So you have no easy options, such as re-sampling images or fixing fonts.

This is not going to help you, but, just for my satisfaction, I ran a few quick tests.

Word .docx document: ~1441 pages, ~3MB compressed, ~30MB uncompressed (text and tables, no images)

Win Word 2007 → PDF (using Acrobat 8 PDF Maker): ~4.2MB

Mac Word 2008 → PDF (using Quartz): ~11MB initial, ~7MB after size reduction

Mac Word 2008 → PDF (using Acrobat 9): ~19MB initial, ~7MB after size reduction

Mac Word 2008 → PostScript (using Quartz): ~267MB → PDF (using Distiller 9): ~6MB.

This is in no way definitive, just a quick-and-dirty run, and there are lots of different options and settings which are involved. But it does suggest a problem. Whether it's Mac OS X's treatment of PDF, or that the Mac Word print function is not as efficient as Win Word's, I don't know. Other than Office, I don't use the same apps on Mac and PC, so I can't test it. I understand that PDF Maker (Win) is specifically optimised for MS Office docs, which is not the case with Acrobat Mac settings or workflows; maybe this explains it.

At any rate, it seems to me that, at this point, if you want to squeeze your MS Office PDFs to the lowest size, you'd better do it on a PC, unless you can find another Mac app to do the job. Or perhaps someone cleverer than myself can figure a way of tweaking the settings to get what you want.

Good luck.

Calamity Jane wrote:

I Googled "Word dotted line tables causing large PDFs" and found this: http://www.jwwalker.com/pages/pdf-faq.html#worddots. I changed the dotted lines to fine lines and hey presto!

Thanks for the tip. Considering the age of that page, it's amazing that this issue still exists in Word. But it's very useful to know it.

I'm trying to figure out how to get Word 2008 to create smaller PDFs, and haven't found any solutions yet.

Whether it's Mac OS X's treatment of PDF, or that the Mac Word print function is not as efficient as Win Word's, I don't know. Other than Office, I don't use the same apps on Mac and PC, so I can't test it. I understand that PDF Maker (Win) is specifically optimised for MS Office docs, which is not the case with Acrobat Mac settings or workflows; maybe this explains it.

Is it Mac OS? I can get a very compact and very legible PDF down below 70KB from a 300KB Quark file (is Quark rendering PDFs with its own engine?). But a 205 KB version of the file in Word (relaid out and saved as DOC or DOCX) creates a 213KB PDF. One huge problem is that Word 2008 has no options available when saving as PDF, so I don't know where it's getting it's PDF instructions from. I've added a custom Quartz filter in the ColorSync Utility, but printing to PDF in Word doesn't give you the Quartz filter options, either.

If I use Print > PDF > Save As Adobe PDF > Adobe PDF Settings: Standard, I can get the file down to 127 KB, though the graphics don't look as good as the 70KB PDF from the Quark file.

I'm running 10.6.8 and Word 2008 12.2.6.