printing Powerpoint to Acrobat file: how to influence file size?

[Heinz Nabielek]

Powerpoint files are often big and difficult to send as email attachment.

So I usually make a pdf out of them. The procedure is to invoke the
Print Handout 2 slides per page Output option Save as File Format PDF.

A recent case: PPT was 6 MB and pdf output 7MB on the Mac and 700 kb on
a PC. Only the latter is useful for me and there is no visible quality
difference between the Mac PDF and the PC PDF. Obviously resulting file
size can be influenced by setting the appropriate Acrobat options, but
how and which?

Best

Heinz

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Heinz,

There's a fairly simple way to change the settings in OSX to control the
file size output. I've seem them published in MacAddict and other places.

If you're interested in finding out more about Adobe's PD format here's
a good place to start:
http://blogs.msdn.com/decheung/archive/2004/04/12/112059.aspx

There's so much written about the topic I wasn't able to find the
step-by-steps in Google, although I'm sure if you search you'll find them.

-Jim

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Powerpoint files are often big and difficult to send as email attachment.

So I usually make a pdf out of them. The procedure is to invoke the
Print Handout 2 slides per page Output option Save as File Format PDF.

A recent case: PPT was 6 MB and pdf output 7MB on the Mac and 700 kb on
a PC. Only the latter is useful for me and there is no visible quality
difference between the Mac PDF and the PC PDF. Obviously resulting file
size can be influenced by setting the appropriate Acrobat options, but
how and which?

The Mac option you're using for making PDFs doesn't use Acrobat and does tend
to make large PDFs. Jim's suggestions should help tame the file sizes (please
do let us know what you find out; as I understand it, the trick is in creating
new filters using the ColorSync Utility in your Applications:Utilities folder -
not possible in my older version Mac OS, so I can't tell you more than that)

If you have Acrobat on the Mac also, changing its settings to match those on
the PC should get you closer to a matched set of PDFs, though it's unlikely
that they'll be absolutely identical.



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Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
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