Built-in PDF compression

zozo
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
may be a MacOS X thread, but whatever



Anyway, is there still no utility or hidden commands to regulate the amount of compression in the builtin PDF save?



The size of the files are just ridiculous.



I made a 1 paragraph text document and saved as PDF via Print and it still came out as a 64KB file. WTF?



I then even tried opening it in Adobe Acrobat 6 and re-saving it, but no difference.



What the heck do they do???

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    toweltowel Posts: 1,479member
    Interesting. You inspired me to play with saving plain-text files as PDFs and see how the file sizes changed:
    Code:


    (sizes in bytes)

    plain-text pdf

    0 (empty) 1058

    1 (letter) 4617

    11 (word) 5312

    91 (sentence) 8739



    Not being anything like an expert, I think the reason is that the PDF has to represent everything as vector graphics, so even having a single letter takes a lot of space. And the overhead of just being a PDF file is about 1k. But once you have lots of text, economy of scale sets in; the more repetitive information you have, the more compression you can do.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Towel

    Interesting. You inspired me to play with saving plain-text files as PDFs and see how the file sizes changed:Code:


    (sizes in bytes)

    plain-text pdf

    0 (empty) 1058

    1 (letter) 4617

    11 (word) 5312

    91 (sentence) 8739



    Not being anything like an expert, I think the reason is that the PDF has to represent everything as vector graphics, so even having a single letter takes a lot of space. And the overhead of just being a PDF file is about 1k. But once you have lots of text, economy of scale sets in; the more repetitive information you have, the more compression you can do.



    Nope. But your PDF file may have embedded fonts, which takes space. Text in PDF is generally represented as text. There's also a lot of formatting that's there to preserve the spacing and sizes across one platform to another. The beauty of PDF is that it's one of the few formats that will look the same from one machine to the next.



    I know that from Quark, there are many options for saving and compressing PDF files. PDF is a very flexible format, and there are many ways to compress PDF files, or otherwise include less information. Good PDF rippers have all sorts of options.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    adamraoadamrao Posts: 175member
    Try this...



    Go to "Print". Click on the third menu down (usually says "Copies & Pages". Make it say "ColorSync". In "Quartz Filter" click on "Reduce File Size". Then go ahead and "Save as PDF". That should make your PDF files smaller.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    zozo Posts: 3,117member
    nope, sorry.



    I tried saving this very page in pdf from safari (minus this comment) and both normal and reduced got exactly same size, to the last byte.



    Hadnt seen that option though.... wonder what it does
  • Reply 5 of 6
    rampancyrampancy Posts: 363member
    On 10.3, the ColorSync Utility application in /Applications/Utilities has a "Compress File Size" function that works on PDF's.



    Not available in 10.2, though.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    adamraoadamrao Posts: 175member
    Really? That's interesting, I've had pretty good luck with that option enabled. I haven't done any real testing, though (haven't had a need to), but I know that some of the things I used to save to PDF were a lot larger than they are now since I enabled that function. I'll do some searching/testing and see what I come up with.
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