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When a Powerpoint (.pptx file) is saved as a .pdf in Powerpoint for Mac, the resulting PDF file is often larger than the original Powerpoint. The primary reason for this is that the Mac OS PDF rendering engine (Quartz PDFContext) sometime encodes graphics in way that results in very large file size.
Simple Ways to Prevent this:
- Use a Windows PC to open and save the Powerpoint
- Open the pptx in the Web-based Powerpoint app (Sign into https://office.com with your FSU email account). Then save it as a PDF from there. To do this, you may need to upload your file to a shared location first.
What to do with the existing large PDF files?
- Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and use Acrobat’s tool to reduce the file size. Either use the simple feature "Reduce File Size" (located in the File Menu on Adobe Acrobat) or, if you would like more customization options, use the Optimization menu. See Optimizing PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro for more information.
- Use Adobe's free browser-based PDF compressor
- It is also possible to reduce the PDF file size using the MacOS PDF viewer (Preview), but this has been reported to result in a loss of image quality.