i was working on printing the latest astronomy club newsletter from word to pdf so our club members could download it from the web (virus free). the file came out at around 1.1 mb in size. that’s a fairly hefty 4-5 page download, i’d almost be better off converting it to html if it wasn’t a painful mind numbing process. so i started poking around a few download sites to see if there were any third party freeware applications that could compress pdf files, nada one, just the standard, overpriced, we never give anything cool away for free adobe products.


so i started playing around with the panther print panel to see if i could tweak the output any. after poking a few times i saw a colorsync menu option on the print dialog that looked harmless. it seems to provide the ability to perform some “quartz filters” before outputting to a print device. it had some options like “blue tone, gray tone, light decrease, sepia tone, etc”. one of the filter choices that caught my eye was “reduce file size” … hummmm, that looks interesting. so i select that and then choose “save as pdf …” (let me see windows do that ellis). upon comparison the pdf went from 1.1 mb without the filter to 320 k with the filter applied. this was to good to be true right, wrong. i opened the pdf in the reader application and it was perfect. i could’t tell the difference between the two. obviously they’d done some optimizations somewhere but they weren’t visible to me in this small document. cudos to apple for this great feature.