Hi, In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 01:52:26PM +0800, Kaye and Geoff wrote: > We were asked to turn a PC-using friend's MSoft Word docs into PDFs > to make them smaller (she needs to email them to multiple recipients).
If it's problematic for her to be sending a 5.2MB attachment, it's usually an indication e-mail is not a good medium to be using. Large attachments are fine if you're sending to someone in your own building, or if there is a pre-established relationship that makes it possible. But in those special circumstances, 5.2MB would not be a problem. One reason OS X's PDFs can be large is that they preserve the quality of the printout. Because of this, they will be influenced entirely by the programme that's used to print them. I've always found that getting printouts from Windows + Microsoft Word + Adobe Acrobat is a recipe large, difficult-to-render PDF files. So, I imagine there are similar problems with the Mac version of Word. (However, at least Mac Office 2004 allows you to place PDF logos in Word documents!) Fortunately, you may be able to find a utility to post-process your files to make them smaller. You might also choose to save them as EPS (which will be much larger than the PDF) and then reduce the EPS down to a PDF with Acrobat. You may or may not find that this makes a difference to the final size. Basically, Acrobat can be asked to reduce the quality of parts of the file (e.g. images), or to weed through a document and squeeze out the redundant parts of the PDF (e.g. fonts, repeated images, etc). This allows Acrobat to produce smaller files than OS X 10.3, because OS X 10.3 doesn't give you the quality options.
