Making PDF files via Word for Mac OS X

[John Huffaker]

I have a Mac G4 running on OS 10.3. I am using Word X and Acrobat 5.05.
When I try to create PDF files of Word X documents they are way too Huge!
What can I do to make more manageable file sizes?

 

[Stephen Fox]

John,

"Too Huge," as in how huge? Cut down the size of your Word doc before
you make the PDF?

Steve

I have a Mac G4 running on OS 10.3. I am using Word X and Acrobat 5.05.
When I try to create PDF files of Word X documents they are way too Huge!
What can I do to make more manageable file sizes?

--
Steve Fox
McKinleyville, CA
http://Steve2004.crazyguyonabike.com
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(*)-'------------(*)

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I have a Mac G4 running on OS 10.3. I am using Word X and Acrobat 5.05.
When I try to create PDF files of Word X documents they are way too Huge!
What can I do to make more manageable file sizes?

You can often get a bit of file size reduction if you print to
postscript, then use Acrobat Distiller. Downside is that Distiller is a
Classic-only app in version 5.

Acrobat 6 also has a reduce file size option - don't remember if the
option exists in 5.05.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Buy Distiller from Adobe.

Word does not have a PDF generator. It uses Mac OS X's native PDF
generator, which puts out uncompressed PDF level 1.1. We can only suspect
that this is a result of a financial arrangement between Apple and Adobe.

If you buy Adobe's full product, you can make any flavour of PDF you wish.

I have a Mac G4 running on OS 10.3. I am using Word X and Acrobat 5.05.
When I try to create PDF files of Word X documents they are way too Huge!
What can I do to make more manageable file sizes?

--

Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Elliott Roper]

I found a neat trick in this month's (May!) MacWorld that might help
scrunch PDFs for free. on p 77 "TIP! Use Colorsync to shrink PDF sizes"
In brief: Print to PDF in Word, Open the PDF file in Colorsync,
FIlters->New, rename it "Compressed", Details->Color pulldown->Images,
then Compression pulldown, choose quality setting, then choose JPEG,
Save-as.
They quoted a pdf scrunched from 57MB to 4MB. I tried a PDF created for
press in InDesign (I rarely do images in Word, so I didn't have
anything scrunchable lying about). It thought about it for some time,
and reduced the document from 227MB to 15MB. It looked slightly better
than the 3MB web ready version that InDesign itself could do if I told
it to scrunch everything for the web from first principles. This was a
48 page booklet with dozens of high res images, eps and stuff.

I find that text only Word documents printed as PDF in OS X are seldom
more than double the Word doc size, and usually much closer to the
original, say about 25% greater.