file conversionpdfpreview
When I used Preview's "Export" feature to export a 1.4MB jpg file to a one page pdf file, the resulting pdf is as large as 14MB, which is really surprising and annoying. I tried to reduce the file size, for instance by "reduce file size" quartz filter, but the pdf became so reduced (56KB) that the result was not readable at all.
Is there anyway to remedy this? A built-in solution is greatly appreciated.
PDFs are funny creatures because Postscript is a very "fat" language; the same PDF can be written multiple ways. I would say that the extra code is probably glue code to put those three documents together and extra bits placed there by whatever utility was used to combine the three.
The best way to get rid of this would be to open the PDF in Acrobat Professional (not Reader) and run it through the "Reduce File Size..." command. This strips out any dead or unnecessary code, optimizes fonts (if two instances of the same font exist, the PDF is rewritten so that only one instance exists), and the like.
Ghostscript probably has a function that does something similar, but off-hand I'm not sure which one that would be.
Never forget your little fellow Automator, sitting in a hard drive near you :)
Launch Automator, create a new workflow. Now you need to add two actions:
In the "Files & Folders" select Ask for Finder Items and drag it.
In the PDFs Category, find "New PDF from Images" and also drag it.
Your workflow should look like this:
Now read the options for each Action and customize accordingly. Investigate similar actions (especially in the Files & Folders category) and perhaps the Photos if you want to transform your images from JPG to something else. In fact, go ahead and look all over automator, there are a lot of interesting things there. :)
When you're satisfied with your Workflow, click "Run" on the top right corner. Watch the magic happens and depending upon the number of items and your CPU power, you might go grab a coffee/tea.
Best Answer
PDF supports JPEG encoding, so the size should not increase very much at all. It should be able to wrap some header info around the jpeg stream and call it a day.
Unfortunately, Preview is very good at viewing PDFs, but when writing PDFs tends to use a subset of PDF that is easy for it to parse, but not space-efficient.
I'm sorry to say this, but you will need to look for a different program that can leave the JPEG alone and shove it in the stream. Acrobat can do this, as can pdftex or
convertfrom ImageMagick. There are probably others.