Compress PDF vs. Reduced File Size Quartz Filter?

Sometimes the PDFs I produce through the print function get pretty huge.
In the PDF drop down on the print menu there is a compress PDF option that I sometimes use.
Then someone said I should go to print, to the copies and pages, select "colour sinc" and on the Quartz Filter select "Reduce File Size" then hit the "save as pdf" on the pdf button.
I have no idea what I just typed
What's the difference between the two approaches and which would produce the best quality PDF at an manageable size?
I just tried PDFing this page using the three options -- regular pdf, compressed pdf and that colour sink / quartz filter / reduce file size. Damned if the smallest file isn't the regular (at 76 kb) next is the reduced (92kb) and the largest file is the compressed (140kb). Maybe not a proper test but what the heck?
Any thoughts?
Thanks

I believe that the same filter is applied no matter whether it is done through the Compress PDF button, which is an Automator action, or using ColorSync.
If you would like to experiment with it, you can also apply it through the ColorSync Utility. If you copy the Reduce File Size filter, you can change the amount of reduction done. You can preview the results there, too.
The filter only affects images, not text.

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Colorsync Utility: PDF Compression vs. Reduce File Size filters

What's the difference between these two? I used Automator to make two applications, which I think I screwed up, because they're not reducing file sizes now. 1 would make 100+ pngs into a pdf and use "reduce file size," I think. 300 MB would become 80 MB, e.g. I would then use a not-so-great PDF application called PDFStudio9 (because I lost my Acrobat DVD and couldn't get a replacement) to OCR that reduced-size pdf. At which point I would run the other application, which I think compressed the OCR'd pdf. Which would be about 40 MB at the end. But I'm not sure if that's the order of compression I used.
So what's the difference between the two types of filters, and when would I want to use each for ultimately creating a non-titanic-sized pdf?

Cathy,
You have posted your question in a forum dedicated to the Final Cut Studio application Color. It is a very specialized program to grade (adjust) the color in video/film images. We know nothing regarding PDFs.
Have you tried posting this on an Adobe support site?
Good luck,
x

Why Does Save As-PDF/A reduce file size when I don't want it to?

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The screen capture won't let me snag the dropdown selection (attached) but the only options available to me are...
Photoshop (*.PSD;*.PDD)
Large Document Format (*.PSB)
OpenEXR (*.EXR)
Photoshop Raw (*.RAW)
Portable Bit Map (*.PBM;*.PGM;*.PPM;*.PNM;*.PFM;*.PAM)
Radiance (*.HDR;*.RGBE;*.XYZE)
TIFF (*.TIF;*.TIFF)

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Hi(Bonjour)!
See this link:
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Hi guys
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Reduce File Size Help

Hi
Would any experts out there know how to adjust the default setting of "Reduce File Size" function? I thought it was linked to the default Colorsync "Reduce File Size" Quartz Filter but I found that changing that filter only effect Save As PDF functions.
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I need to zip pdf files to email them to a PC user. The problem is file size is not reduced.
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Reducing file size #2...Preview, Quartz Filter vs Adobe Pro Optimize

Questions on reducing a pages to pdf file…I will post each question seperatly.
2) I read that you can reduce file size of a pdf in preview with a quartz filter. I created my own filer and it worked as expected. But, I also have Adobe Acrobat Pro, with save as PDF Optimized. The pro seems to have much more capability than the quartz filters.
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THanks, Bob

The Adobe Acrobat settings you chose are probably using .jpeg to reduce the file size.
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PDF reduce file size filters and CMYK to RGB conversion

This doesn't seem to be on-topic to this forum, but I'm hoping someone here has the expertise to answer my question. We have some scripts which take a series of press-quality pdfs and use the "reduce file size" filter to prepare them for viewing on the web. We run these scripts on a 10.4 machine, and the filter works very well, reliably reducing file sizes of all sorts of pages.
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2) For converting press documents to pdfs that are going to go on the web, what is a good "Convert to profile" to use of the 40-some choices on the pull-down menu?

Cathy,
You have posted your question in a forum dedicated to the Final Cut Studio application Color. It is a very specialized program to grade (adjust) the color in video/film images. We know nothing regarding PDFs.
Have you tried posting this on an Adobe support site?
Good luck,
x

PDF Reduce File Size makes certain pdfs HUGE

Generally reduce file size works great for me but certain files, those coming from someone using Microsoft Publisher in particular, result in larger pdfs. She sends me newsletters for a website and sometimes the 3 page pdfs are 2-4mb. I tried opening in Preview and re-saving them using the Reduce File Size filter and the result is that they ballon up to 50-100mb!! Info for the file reveals that the pdf producer is GPL Ghostscript 8.15 and the content creator is PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2. I seem to be able to open and reduce file size using Acrobat so I'm not quite sure why Preview is choking on them.

geekinthegarden wrote:
Generally reduce file size works great...
Microsoft Publisher...Ghostscript...PScript5.dll
I seem to be able to open and reduce file size using Acrobat so I'm not quite sure why Preview is choking on them.
Hi geekinthegarden- This does not surprise me. There are many variations and reiterations in specifications of the PDF format.
Going from Ghostscript language interpreter, to Apple in rendering could introduce complications which we will not be able to sort out in this forum encapsulating a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D documents that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents.
Suffice to say it is not a perfect science.
Print PDF has a compress PDF file option as well as ColorSynch in your /Utilities folder +reduce file size+ option for PDF's. This may or may not be of use.
You found your workaround using Acrobat, this is part of the value of having more than one PDF viewer, good computing!

How do you reduce file size of a PDF if Save As doesnt work?

I have been trying to reduce the size of a PDF, using the Save As > Optimized PDF method.
I have also tried Save As > Reduced Size PDF.
This is on a file made up of 20 pages of full page Jpegs. (These were generated by the script in Photoshop that generates Jpeg files from Layer Comps within the document.)
If I use Reduced Size PDF, I get a greatly reduced file size but the image quality suffers greatly. (Lots of artifacts and blurryness)
There are no options to choose the level of compression I want.
If I use Optimized PDF method, I cant seem to reduce the file size no matter what I set the Jpeg compression to.
Is there some way to cut the size of the file down but not lose so much image quality?
Any suggestions?

Part of the problem here is that the files that are produced when I run the script to output files from layer comps are very big.
If I "save for web" for each layer comp, I wind up with way smaller Jpegs. Thus a much smaller PDF.
So the question is: Can you make the script, Layer Comps to Files, create smaller more optimized Jpegs? (Like you get when you save for web)

Reduce File Size and Optimise PDF both increase file size

Hi All
I have exported a pdf (our college mag) at smallest file size from Indesign CS4 for online use. The problem is the resultant file size is a little under 19Mb. Using both or either Reduce File Size or Optimise functions simply result in an increase to 22Mb. The document is packed with images however I would have thought one or both of these processes would have helped reduce the file size to a more manageable download file size.
A pdf is also produced to go to print so simply compressing all images prior to imcuding them in Indesign is not a preferable option - this would mean creating two separate Indesign documents, something which I would rather avoid if possible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as always.
The file reside here if anyone cares to take a look http://www.ayrcoll.ac.uk/index.php?name=UpDownload&req=viewdownload&cid=11&orderby=dateD It's the latest release (September 09)
Thanks
Colin

You might want to do an audit of the PDF (button in PDF Optimizer) and try to figure out what the various parts are. It shows 58% is content streams (sorry, but I am not sure what that is), 26% is overhead, and only 12.7% is graphics. Since you are not storing bookmarks and such, you might want to try going back to ID and printing to the Adobe PDF printer for a comparison. It may be one technique is more efficient than the other.
When I used the optimizer, the file did get larger. When I used Reduce File Size, it got slightly smaller. The key may be in figuring out what the various parts are from the audit. You might try copying one page of ID to a new document and play with various versions - different fonts (all were embedded and that is probably best), variations on graphics, etc. That is all I can suggest since I would simply be playing with different ways to produce the document and looking at what is causing the bloat. When the Images are only 12.7% and the fonts less than 1%, there is something going on to produce the size, and those 2 are typically the killers. I would mention tags that tend to bloat, but you do not have any (normally used for assessibility).
You might want to try some of the preflight checks to find issues. I did the transparency check and got 170 instances in 22 pages. Flattening the page may help. There were some pages that seemed to be very bad. However, I did not get a big file size reduction. I did not get a lot of improvement by printing to a new PDF either. Certain pages seem to be part of the bloat problem. The print took a long time around pages 11 and 22.
One troubleshooting technique would be extract pages to separate files and look at the details of each page to see what is causing the issue.
Need to go. Good luck.

Compress PDF vs. Reduced File Size Quartz Filter?

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