I have a 35-page academic paper in foo.pdf created using LaTeX. The full document is 950 KB.
I want to extract the figures and tables at the end of document into a separate file, so I open the document in Preview and drag the pages I need onto the desktop. This creates a new file, foo (dragged).pdf which is 2.2 MB.
How can the last 10 pages of a 35-page document be 2.4 times larger than the original document? Is OSX adding lots of metadata to these pages? I consider this a curiosity more than a problem, but still…
Best Answer
The Mac OS does not optimize PDF files the way Acrobat or other PDF generating applications usually do. It may also be that when you drag the page to the desktop is is making a PDF that is really just a wrapper for an bitmap image.
You could try using "Export As..." by right-clicking a thumbnail of a page and see if that results in smaller files. Another choice would be to delete all of the pages you do not want to keep and then save the file.
Here is a decent thread about optimizing PDF file sizes in Mac OS. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3213814?start=0&tstart=0