Using ColorSync to Compress PDFs
smellvetica (20 pencils) | Wed, 2005-07-06 08:30Here's a very handy tip..
I've recently exported my latest folio in PDF to be printed and was quite suprised to find that it weighed in at a hefty 51MB. After messing around with the formatting and compression settings I only had managed to reduce the file by 1MB at most, that's until I opened Apple's ColorSync Utility [in the Utilities folder].
Open up this little fella, then open your PDF file via it. Use the 'Reduce File Size' setting and whack 'Apply'. The PDF is now 6.1MB with no loss of quality. Incredible. Hope you find this useful.
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Graphic Designer
http://www.nickclement.co.uk
Commenting on this Forum topic is closed.
I discovered that if I open a regular pdf in Preview (Tiger version) and resave it, I will end up with a much smaller pdf. I couldn't recognize any diferences between the original and the Preview version. I'm not sure what it did, but you may want to give it a try.
Well all that info must mean something, right? I'd be hesitant to do this until I know what I'm losing. Anybody know?
I'm with you, oh Prickly One:
I wanna know exactly what's happening when I reduce the file size.
Smellvetica:
Did you read this somewhere, or discover it by accident? If you can reference an article about this, please share a link with us (or some legible scans if from a printed source)
Yeah, what could possibly cause that? It's pretty strange that the native generator would provide arbitrary and unnecessary information to bloat your file and...
...wait, no. That's not so strange.
I use a little tool called PDF Compress. I think it works pretty well... http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15836
paul burd \\ multimedia designer
portfolio \\ weblog
paul burd \\ multimedia designer
portfolio \\ weblog
You can also use the same filter when you print the PDF using the OS X Print dialog boxes. In the print dialog box, if you look in the pulldown menu at the bottom (where "Copies & Pages" is the first option in the menu), you can choose "ColorSync." Two more pulldown menus will appear, one of which is the Quartz Filter, where you can choose "Reduce File Size."
All of these file-shrinking methods are very mysterious. Someone more familiar with Quartz may be able to shed some light on what is happening with PDFs when this is chosen. It can't be as easy as changing the line in the PDF that says, "Bloat = Very Yes."
a problem like ths when we used placed photoshop duotone or DCS images in a layout program. Acrobat didn't seem to know what to do with them and as a result would not apply the selected compression or downsampling settings to them - and the files were huge.
The only solution was converting the images to RGB as temps, replacing and re-distilling.
A nut for a jar of tuna
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A nut for a jar of tuna
probably those who often need to do it will benefit from making an automator action (figure) ...
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Of course Acrobat has a reduce file size function too... but one must own Acrobat.
Well I assume it's something to do with the Quartz engine, unfortunately I know very little about the inner workings of OSX. It seems to work fine so that's good enough for me. With regards to Acrobat's 'Reduce File Size' function, it has t be said that it does very little for me at 300dpi, and ColorSync does the biz.
It's all been a case of trial and not many errors to be fair, so I can't complain. Please feel fee to try it and report back here.
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Graphic Designer
http://www.nickclement.co.uk