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After a little digging into Preview I stumbled across two options which allow you to shrink the size of a PDF. Most of the time these two methods may not produce useful result, they may be as tiny as possible. However if you have used a program which isn’t designed for PDF (Word for some reason springs to mind) this trick might be useful. There are two options which you can use, both offer different results.

Both of the compression options are found in the Save As menu. First find a large PDF file that you want to shrink, any will do for this example. Go to File > Save As. In the save box there will be two drop down items. The second one is what we are interested in, Quartz Filter. From the drop down menu select none. This may be counter intuitive at first, however it allows the PDF engine to run and reduce any parts that it can. It doesn’t run any other filters. For the most part on an uncompressed PDF this will produce pleasing results. The image below show the drop down box on the Save As menu.

how to compress PDF files on a Mac

The option of having no Quartz Filter for the most part is sufficient. This can reduce the file size. This option is known as loss less, so it wont remove anything at all and keep things in high quality. This is needed for PDF’s with images. However for PDF’s with only text or simple geometric shapes to may be better to reduce the file size even more.

To apply a reduction in quality (however it still stays pretty good) in the drop down select “Reduce File Size”, I never notice it at first. This option will crunch images and remove parts of the PDF that are not needed, in a similar method of a jpeg images. There are slight problems with this method. Images turn out horrible and lose all quality. However for text and simple bands of colour it is perfect, and the reduction in file size can be massive.

Hopefully these two option apply to you. The first one, for the most part, doesn’t produce any decent results (one files size was larger) if the original PDF is made in Preview. However the second option always reduces the files size, usually by half.

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I really love this photo. I just don’t know why but it’s cool enough to make me happy. Waiting for my lunch to show up after I’ll prepare my Lavazza espresso. It’s just an ordinary day …. by the way just got Snow Leopard installed 4 days ago ! No big differences from it’s younger brother but I have noticed a speed increase and I’m a really big fan of 64 bit applications.

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I was comparing the two versions  Leopard and the newly arrived Snow Leopard…. decided to upgrade this week or so, gotta take a walk to our small Apple shop. Here are some reasons to upgrade:

10. It’s Leopard Done Right
The release of Mac OS X Leopard was fraught with peril. It was late, it ran a bit slow, and it offered amazing new features — some of which weren’t fully ready for prime time. Snow Leopard is all about performance, optimizing features to deliver a great experience. It takes what you know today and makes it perfect.

9. It’s only $30
Recognizing that it has an evolution, not a revolution, on its hands, Apple’s keeping Snow Leopard incredibly cheap for existing Leopard users. At $30, it’s more than we paid to move from 10.0 to 10.1 (which was free), but it’s still one heck of a bargain. And it’s only $50 for a family pack.

8. You’ll add six gigs to your hard drive
This is a no-brainer. If you install Snow Leopard, your hard drive gets bigger — it takes up six or seven fewer gigabytes than Leopard. It’s less bloated in more ways than one.

7. Smarter Stacks and Expose
The OS X Finder already contains some of the most innovative UI elements ever. Snow Leopard makes them smarter. Stacks allows scrolling and advanced support for multiple folders now. And Expose allows you to just click on an app’s icon, thereby allowing you to select between that app’s windows.

6. It’s fully 64-bit, so buy 17.2 billion gigs of RAM!
If you own a recent Mac (anything with a Core 2 Duo), you’ve got a 64-bit processor. And with a fully rewritten Finder and under-the-hood code, Snow Leopard will let you manipulate absolutely gigantic files, up to 17.2 billion gigabytes at a time. Basically, if you’re doing high-end photo or video work, this will be the best platform ever.

5. Killer Multiprocessing with Grand Central
Apple’s been pushing multiprocessing since at least 2000, but the promise has never really paid off for most users. Snow Leopard aims to change that with Grand Central Dispatch, a powerful API for creating multicore-optimized code. Some apps will run faster right away, and it will only get better over time as other developers get caught up. It will be the gift that keeps on giving.

4. Unleash the Power of Your GPU With OpenCL
Time was, Windows lovers could (justifiably) deride the 3-D graphics power being packed by Macs. Anyone who tried to run Quake III Arena on a first-gen iMac can remember the pain we all shared. That’s changed now. The integrated NVIDIA graphics in even Apple’s low-end machines are totally respectable, and the dedicated cards in the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro are downright brawny. Unfortunately, unless you’re a gamer, an architect or an industrial designer, that probably doesn’t matter much to you. That’s why OpenCL is so great — it’s a coding framework that allows ordinary applications to tap into the extra power in your graphics card for all tasks, from web browsing to iPhoto. Snow Leopard’s all about power, and OpenCL’s a big part of it.

3. Native Exchange Support
A lot of factors have kept Macs out of the office over the years, but none has been more significant than the lack of MS Exchange e-mail, address book and calendar support. Outlook is as close to a standard as a proprietary format ever comes, and Apple’s taking its experiments with Exchange on the iPhone to the desktop. From now on, anyone with a Mac can make appointments, view contacts, and send e-mail via Exchange. I don’t know if I’ll ever bring my work computer home again.

2. QuickTime X Restores What the Tech Was Meant to Be
One of the great disappointments of long-time Mac users has been watching the slow decline of QuickTime. Once a legendary consumer multimedia player and editor, it increasingly became over-shadowed by iLife and iMovie. Charging for the Pro version meant that most people steered clear of it entirely (I couldn’t tell you the last time I played a video in QuickTime Player). QuickTime X fixes all of that. A ground-up rewrite, X integrates all former Pro versions into a free version for the rest of us. It’s two-and-a-half times faster than previous versions, plus built-in authoring capabilities, including recording via iSight and microphone, YouTube and Mobile Me uploads, and export to iPhone. Basically, it’s finally Apple giving some love to the multimedia technology that started it all.

1. Because You, Like Me, Are a Gigantic Apple Fanboy or -girl
It’s OK. We have a cult for that. Think it’ll make it here by Saturday?

Some text copied from http://www.cultofmac.com/10-reasons-why-snow-leopard-is-an-essential-upgrade/15010

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