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For originating documents that are entirely text, like a resume or a Word document that’s been converted to a PDF without any sort of optimization, it can make a huge difference, and you may see a file sized from 1MB shrinking down to under 100k. Just how much space you will save by using this file reduction filter varies greatly, depending on the content of the PDF, the original app that created and saved the PDF and if any filtering was applied to begin with, amongst a variety of other factors. Additionally, if you don’t need a color document then choosing “Greyscale” as the filter can also dramatically reduce the file size of a PDF document) (Note: you can also access Quartz Filters through “Save As” with new versions of Preview for Mac OS, but the File > Export trick works for prior versions of the app as well. Save the new reduced version of the PDF as usual by hitting “Save”.Select the submenu next to “Quartz Filter” and choose “Reduce File Size”.Pull down the “File” menu and choose “Export”.Open the PDF file that you want to reduce the size for in Preview app (typically Preview is the default PDF viewer in Mac OS * but if not you can find it in the /Applications/ folder of Mac OS).How to Reduce PDF File Size on Mac with Preview This is obviously covering PDF files as the outcome document, but you can use a similar export process to save Pages files to Word DOC format on the Mac as well as some other file formats, including Plain Text, Rich Text, and older Pages compatibility formats too.Īnother approach that would get the same end result is to use the Mac Print to PDF feature, but going that route gives you less control over the resulting file quality, and you can’t set a password on the file if desired.Let’s get to it and learn how to reduce the file size of a PDF on the Mac. * You can also choose to set a password for file during the export process if desired. The freshly created PDF file will be available at the location you chose. Give the PDF file a name, choose a location, then choose “Export” to save the Pages file as a PDF document.Adjust the quality settings if desired, then choose “Next” *.Pull down the “File” menu and choose “Export To” then select “PDF”.Open the file into Pages that you want to save as a PDF.It’s quite simple: How to Save a Pages File as PDF on Mac The approach discussed here will take any Pages file and save it as a PDF, this basically converts the Pages document to a PDF document through an export process.
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