[Pro] Preparing a Downloadable File

Hi All,

I’m preparing a PDF file to be included on my website for downloading.
It consists of about a dozen PDF pages that I’ve combined into a single
51 MB PDF file (using the Combine PDFs app). At 51 MB, the file is too
big for a reasonable download time (5 minutes on my slow Internet
connection), so I’m thinking I should compress it into a ZIP file. I’ve
tried creating a ZIP using the Mac built-in Create Archive command, but
the result is still 51 MB. I’ve been told that PDFs don’t compress
much. Is there a better way or should I just leave it all as a 2 or 3
minute download?

Thanks in advance,

Richard
(Panther 10.3.9)


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Is this an image-based or a text-based PDF? IF the former, Preview.app can use a number of different Quartz filters to alter the image content in a PDF. Some of these can literally suck the stuffing out of a large image, at the cost of reduced quality. Fiddle with the settings and see what your results look like. If this is a text-based PDF, then that’s a hella lot of text.

Walter

On Mar 27, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Richard Houston wrote:

Hi All,

I’m preparing a PDF file to be included on my website for downloading. It consists of about a dozen PDF pages that I’ve combined into a single 51 MB PDF file (using the Combine PDFs app). At 51 MB, the file is too big for a reasonable download time (5 minutes on my slow Internet connection), so I’m thinking I should compress it into a ZIP file. I’ve tried creating a ZIP using the Mac built-in Create Archive command, but the result is still 51 MB. I’ve been told that PDFs don’t compress much. Is there a better way or should I just leave it all as a 2 or 3 minute download?

Thanks in advance,

Richard
(Panther 10.3.9)


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Acrobat Pro can also reduce pdf sizes dramatically.


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On Mar 27, 2012, at 11:38 AM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

Is this an image-based or a text-based PDF?

Thanks for the quick reply, Walter. Each page has a jpeg image at a
resolution of 240 ppi to offer relatively decent quality for printing.
Maybe it’s not entirely unreasonable to expect a 5 minute download
time. (Upload to the web host server was slow too!)

Richard


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On Mar 27, 2012, at 11:50 AM, chuckamuck wrote:

Acrobat Pro can also reduce pdf sizes dramatically.

Thanks Chuckamuck, unfortunately I don’t have Pro. I’ve decided a
couple-minute download isn’t that big of a deal – especially since it
will be the rare occasion that I direct a potential client to this
particular web page.

Thanks to all,

Richard


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Walter’s suggestion is good if you want the lowest quality and smallest size as that is the only choice. But, after a brief Google, I found this; Mimsy: Quality reduced file size in Mac OS X Preview

With this method of creating a profile for quality reduction you can play with it till you get the settings that give you the output to suit your needs.


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