PdfCompress For Mac

PdfCompress is a Mac OS X utility for reducing the size of PDF files. The PDF files produced by Mac OS X's Quartz rendering system are beautiful, but huge, and therefore often not usable for posting on the web or sending via e-mail.

The reason for these gargantuan file-sizes is that Quartz uses a generic compression method (zip) for all data in the PDF files it generates and takes a very safe approach to including possibly redundant data.

Although this approach is laudable for safety in pre-press environments, and closely matches the PDF/X1 and PDF/X3 standards for pre-press data interchange, it leads to files that are larger than absolutely necessary for many common usage scenarios. Some third party applications add meta- and edit-data, which PdfCompress can also remove.

PdfCompress will optimize such PDF files by applying specialized image compression methods to the images stored in the file, as well as removing unneeded elements.

Photographic image are reduced by up to a factor of 10 without visible degradation using JPEG 2000 or JPEG compression, bi-level images are typically reduced by 20-30% using lossless CCIT Group 4 (Fax) encoding. PdfCompress can downsample images to a lower resolution suitable for screen-viewing, for example on the web.

Apart from its ultra-fast and reliable operation, what users like most about PdfComprses is its ease of use: just drag a PDF file onto its icon, and the compressed PDF is created almost instantaenously, or use it directly from any application via Mac OS X's PDF Services feature, supported starting with PdfCompress 4.1.

NOTE: To buy PdfCompress via the App Store, an Apple account is required.