Everytime I attach a keynote to an email it gets compressed into a zip file. Is they a way to avoid this?
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)
Apple Mail is doing this not Keynote, to avoid this, use Dropbox it works perfectly and has the ability to send large file sizes.
The reason why your presentation is being compressed is due to the nature of the file format used for the lastest version of iWork.
iWork uses the OS X "Package" format for all of its document files. iWork Document files are actually folders, rather than single binary files - OS X built in apps knows this, and represents them as files, but other applications may not have this knowledge and treat them as the folders they actually are. A good example of this are web browsers. If you try to upload a Keynote document to an internet location, Safari will 'automagically' zip the package during the upload process. Any other browser (e.g. Firefox, Chrome) sees the package as a folder, and will not let you upload it - trying to select the file in these browsers will cause them to 'open' the package folder and show you the content of the folder.
Mail is an OS X application and knows that it has to zip the Package if it is to be sent. The way it treats packages is similar to how it treats folders - if you try and attach a folder to an email (by dragging the folder to the email body during compose) Mail will zip those files too.
This problem with Package files is well known - the original versions of iWork also used this format and it caused similar issues then. Due to negative feedback about the problems people had uploading these files to web sites, Apple changed the file format. iWork 09 documents are actually packages that have been zipped: if you open them using an unzip utility you can see the package contents within Finder. Because they are zip files, they can be mailed or uploaded like normal files.
It has not been explained why Apple has reverted to unzipped package files for the latest version of iWork.
Presumably once enough complaints are received they will enable compressed iWork document package files again, and the problem will go away.
HTH
Why does my Keynote presentation get compressed when I attach it to an email
