How the **** do I reduce pdf size without affecting quality on a MAC ?

You can't have Adobe Acrobat preinstalled because it's not an Apple product, and to the best of my knowledge Apple does not preinstall any third-party software. I don't see how that leads to your Mac "killing you", since few if any other computer vendors preinstall Acrobat either.

As to reducing file size of a PDF, you can of course buy Adobe Acrobat X. It does a very good job of reducing file size without compromising quality in most cases. There are also third-party products such as PDF Compress that only reduce file size:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/8823/pdfcompress

but I have no personal experience with them.

Regards.

You can also print to PDF several pages at once. Under the Print Dialog box you have a Save to PDF option. Sadly this may reduce the quality to 72 dpi depending on your OS version. I'm not aware whether this is a 10.6.8 limitation or not. But at least you can separate your 7 pages to several 1 or 2 page documents a piece in separate e-mail attachments or files to be stored on a limited storage website for transfer. E-mail attachments themselves don't always work when the e-mail software used by the recipient is different than the sender.

Hi there. Here is a link to an old discussion. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1292868?start=0&tstart=0

This should solve your problem

Steve H

Steve - that solution doesn't work, the linked files are gone (it's from 2008!)

From what I've read, you need to create new filters in your ColorSync utility, but how you do that, I haven't yet discovered. Once you have the right filters configured, apparently they will show up in your "quartz filters" drop-down menu in Preview when you "export" the document.

http://docupub.com/pdfcompress/ looks like an easy place to upload a PDF to get it compressed. Of course you will need the bandwidth to do it. Go to a library, or Apple store where they might have more bandwidth than you do at home if that is the problem.