I have noticed only now that my Word 2010 (docx) documents that are just a single page long and include a simple WMF vector graphic and a bit of text are almost 1 MB large. The Word document is only 50 kB and a PDF file created with Bullzip PDF printer is about the same size. So what is Microsoft writing into the other 950 kB?
Update: As I keep getting answers recently that all do not apply, I'd like to save you the work. The issue has gone away after using Windows 7 instead of XP (which I did over a year ago). Something doesn't seem to be supported on the old system, I suspect it's some font subsetting or so. Also I cannot try your suggestions because the issue does not exist anymore. So I'm not able to accept answers to this.
Best Answer
This is still a problem with Word 2016. Perhaps not the same as the OP had, but it's still there: start with a 1 page 20 KB document, save as PDF, get a 300 KB PDF.
I can't say why Word does this, but there is an easy way to minify these PDF files: install GhostScript, then run the following command:
where %1 is the input PDF and %2 is the output PDF. Turns that 300 KB PDF into a 40 KB PDF. Still not as small as CutePDF (that one managed about 30 KB for the same document) but a vast improvement.
Or just skip this step and print to CutePDF directly.