Comments on: Better PDF File Size Reduction in OS X

By: Pico

Pico — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:28:45 +0000

Great tip: Works perfectly!

If you do cannot find a Filters folder in your Library folder, just go to (Your Computer) -> Users -> (Your User Name) -> Library, create a new folder and name it Filters, and then copy “Reduce File Size (75%).qfilter” into your new folder.

This worked successfully for me in OSX 10.5.8.

Thanks!

By: an

an — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:33:49 +0000

Thank you!!!!! I tried everything else, all terrible quality for the text PDF. Great advice– setting parameters for the image *and* changing the compression settings.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:31:13 +0000

Awesome, I was googling around and trying a number of things but this is perfect, especially for scanned txt as the default filter turns it to garbage!

By: Geoff Green

Geoff Green — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:22:46 +0000

Eric, thanks for the fabulous tip. It works great. I have a quick question for you — I recreated it per your instructions, but how do you export the .qfilter file for a new filter? I haven’t been able to figure that out at all.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:01:28 +0000

John, it turns out there's a known problem in Lion—here's an Apple forum discussion with advice on workarounds. I'll update the post to reflect this. Thanks for the heads-up!

By: John McDonald

John McDonald — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:50:33 +0000

Love it, worked well in Snow Leopard. But couldn’t get it working in Lion. Please advise.

By: Wallace Weeks

Wallace Weeks — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:21:09 +0000

Awesome advice! Thank you so much for sharing. The built in filter turned my 960MB PDF with great image quality into 770KB with crap for images and a poor reflection on a professional photog. Now I have a 2.8MB PDF that still has good images.

By: Guillermo Velasquez

Guillermo Velasquez — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 02:14:43 +0000

Dude…

I love you…

You made my scholarship application possible, ShrinkIt, PDF Shrink and all those worthless tools didn’t make the trick…

Thanks!

By: Gordon

Gordon — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:58:58 +0000

Awesome. You rock my pdf world.

By: Richard Stewart

Richard Stewart — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:08:15 +0000

Worked brilliant!

I reduced a 5.5MB file down to just over 700K, without any real visual difference!

Thanks!!

By: HJ

HJ — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:14:27 +0000

This was incredibly useful thank you so much for this. I had the choice of a 80Mb good quality or 568Kb awful one before.

Now I have have a 7Mb happy medium!

By: kb

kb — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:13:29 +0000

Wow! This worked perfectly! I was able to go from a 14 MB pdf to a very readable 492 KB pdf in no time.

The only thing I can’t seem to do is change the name of the quartz filter. No big deal – I just have to remember that the name is File Reduction Size Copy.

Thanks so much – this is one of the few online pieces of advice that actually worked for me!

By: John From Berkeley » links for 2010-04-22

John From Berkeley » links for 2010-04-22 — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:40:25 +0000

[...] Eric's Archived Thoughts: Better PDF File Size Reduction in OS X (tags: osx pdf tools tips howto keynote) [...]

By: fizzix » PDF File Size in OS X

fizzix » PDF File Size in OS X — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:57:48 +0000

[...] or otherwise) that you need to shrink to email to colleagues you should wander over to this blog. He has a nice Quartz filter you can download that allows you to open PDFs (particularly [...]

By: Ina

Ina — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:17:00 +0000

Great tutorial! Just what I needed to reduce pdf files for downloads. With one reduction reduced 5.9MB to 592KB. Used the second (manual) technique, and the pictures have no noticeable quality reduction. Thanks so much!