I’ve got many many PowerPoint presentations from over the years, and so one key tool in my move to the Mac has of course being Office for the Mac. The other day when somebody wanted a read-only copy of a presentation I was impressed at how easy it was to create a PDF version on the Mac. Duly created I attached it a note, sent some other urgent notes, and then went about my business. A while later I came back and checked to see whether my important notes had gone out since a call was about to start, only to find them stuck behind the mammoth and I’m mean fucking mammoth note containing the PDF I’d created! My 15Mb PPT had been turned into a 80Mb PDF … WTF!!
It turns out that the default approach to creating PDFs isn’t very smart! Sure they’ll be beautiful and hi-res and all that, but they’re too fucking big! A wee bit of squirelling around found me the answer and so here you go … it all comes down to previewing in Preview and then saving a PDF with an appropriate Quartz filter. Here’s a post on the Apple Support site with some pre-done filters, and here’s another blog post which explains about how to create more filters yourself.
Once I’d installed the filters and worked out how to invoke them most easily, my 15Mb PPT was reduced to a more reasonable 9Mb PDF.