• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Apple / Hallelujah! OS X Can Reduce PDF File Size!

Hallelujah! OS X Can Reduce PDF File Size!

October 23, 2008 By Stephen 32 Comments

One feature of OS X that really surprised me was it’s amazing ability to handle PDF files. Since switching to mac earlier this year, I’ve become a PDF monster – OS X allowed me to go completely paperless for most business functions, including expense reports. I’ve started using the “Save as PDF” function constantly, organizing receipts and online statements for later reference, which Spotlight makes even easier.

But one thing bugged me. I use an HP Photosmart C6180 all-in-one scanner/printer/fax/copier, and while it works well, its scans are huge. I mean massive. A single-page color PDF scan of a recent magazine article I wrote became a 6.1 MB PDF file!

Then I noticed the “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter in the “Save As” dialog box. “Cool” I thought, “OS X will automatically reduce the file size for me!” Not so fast, though – although this filter did reduce the file size to just 36 KB, it also made the text unreadable! I needed a better solution…

This post is part of my series focused on Apple OS X tips and tricks.

  • Access NTFS Volumes On Your Mac
  • Clean Up Your Mac! Essential OS X Tidiness Tools and Techniques
  • How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
  • Hallelujah! OS X Can Reduce PDF File Size!
  • Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
  • OS X Custom Drive Icons 2: Boot Camp and NTFS

Look what the generic "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter in OS X did to my document - it's unreadable!
Look what the generic "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter in OS X did to my document - it may have reduced the size from 6.1 MB to 36 KB, but it's unreadable!

So I soldiered on, trying to tweak the scanner’s settings to produce smaller files. But they were still multi-megabyte files. I was stumped.

But the other day, I decided to try again to find a solution. And hallelujah! A solution I have found!

It turns out that you can set up your own custom Quartz filters in OS X – it’s just not obvious how to do it. Buried in the Color Sync utility is a tab called Filters.

Here, I discovered why the default “Reduce” filter looked so bad. My scans were in TIFF format, which looks great but is basically uncompressed. When you apply the “Reduce” filter, it converted any images it found to JPEG format, which dramatically reduced the image size. But it also scaled the images down to a miniscule 512×128 pixels! This is fine for the average inline illustration but terrible for a full-page image like a scanned document!

So, following the directions I found at hoboes.com, I created my own filter. Mine is exactly the same as the generic Reduce filter in that it converts images to medium-compressed JPEG, but I skip the image re-sampling so it keeps its native resolution. The result is a Quartz filter that reduces the size of scanned images but leaves them looking good enough to read or print. See the results below for yourself!

By skipping the image scaling I was able to reduce the 6.1 MB file to 468 KB while maintaining readability
By skipping the image scaling I was able to reduce the 6.1 MB file to 468 KB while maintaining readability

Then I got thinking – what if I turned the JPEG quality down to minimum? The results still looked pretty good – my 6.1 MB file was now 196 KB and looked just about as good as the original for casual viewing.

By turning the JPEG quality to minimum, I reduced the file size to just 196 KB!
By turning the JPEG quality to minimum, I reduced the file size to just 196 KB!

So I’m happy. I can again scan and email smaller files. I just wish Quartz supported an open format like PNG! And I wish the HP printer wouldn’t constantly disappear from both OS X and Vista, but that’s another story for another day.

Update: More info on creating a Quartz filter and formatting documents for the iPhone.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying…
  • Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me
  • GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But…

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With: Apple, HP, JPEG, JPG, OS X, PDF, Preview, Quartz, scan, scanner, TIFF

Primary Sidebar

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

Jef Raskin

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

May 29, 2020

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays

    November 19, 2013

    The Ideal pfSense Platform: Netgate RCC-VE 2440

    September 21, 2015

    From Kipling’s Dirigibles to the Jet Age

    May 13, 2012

    Edward Snowden Is Right: We Must Protect The Internet

    March 19, 2014

    Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

    April 4, 2017

    The iPhone Revolution 10 Years Later

    January 9, 2017

    Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

    July 19, 2017

    What’s the Deal with Containers?

    October 21, 2016

    A High-Tech Water Heater? Yep! Introducing the A. O. Smith Vertex

    November 15, 2012

    My Core i7 Macintosh SE

    May 25, 2017

    Copyright © 2021 · Log in