Changing PDF quality when printing to file

[Furi0usBee]

When I print my word doc (with images) to a PDF file, it uses the
highest quality possible, thus my files are larger. Is there any way to
enable some compression in Word before I print the PDF file?

Thanks,
Bryan

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi Bryan,
you can use Mac OS X to compress your PDF file. Note however that you can do
this from Mac OS X 10.3 onwards only; since you're not stating which version
of Word and Mac OS you're using, this makes it of course kind of difficult
to help you.
There are two ways of reducing the file size of your PDF:

a) in your print dialogue, choose ColorSync, and apply the "reduce file
size" filter. This reduces the quality of your pictures quite a lot, so it's
not only a compression, and the final results might not satisfy you.

b) create your PDF file the way you usually would, and open it with
ColorSync Utility, located in your Utilities folder. Create a new filter,
name it any way you want. Under "Details", select "Images" from the dropdown
menu, and "Compression" from the next menu. You can now choose to define the
quality of your images, just play around with the slider and see what
results are best for you. Save the file, and, in case you want to repeat
this more often, also make sure that you save your new filter.

Michel

 

[WJ Shack]

In theory defining a custom filter as described by Michel Bintener should be
the right solution, but I find that no matter what jpeg quality you set, it
always reverts to medium. Do others find that the system retains another
setting. This produces high compression with reasonably good quality, but
unless I really need the additional compression, I prefer a somewhat higher
quality setting. The bulit-in "Reduce File Size" filter as Biltener notes
compresses the hell out of the file, but reduces quality dramatically.

I mostly use a utility called pdf compress. It is $25. I set the
preferences to retain all fonts and compress images to a quality between
medium and highest. This gives lots of compression (factor of 3-5) with
minimal loss in quality. You print the file to pdf as usual and then drag
and drop it on pdf compression. Or it will create a pdf workflow option so
that when you click on the pdf button in the print dialog, it will give you
an option to directly go to pdf compress.