Back in April, after my jcolas filters failed in macOS Mojave, I was unable to compress PDFs and retain image quality. I tried tweaking the ColorSync Utility to do this, but despite my efforts, no joy this time. Then I brushed away the nonsense written about Preview’s PDF reduction capabilities, and finally found the free http://wecompress.com site.
A quick drag and drop and I was presented with a 90% reduction of my 121MB PDF. And just as importantly, the compressed document retained good image quality. Just what I needed as I had to send the file to a bunch of people.
I did explore a couple of other apps, and Lightweight PDF, which is free, was note bad, achieving nearly 50% reduction of the same file.
Since I regularly compress and distribute PDFs of image-intense presentations to a hundred or so students (and usually in the middle of the night), I forked out the $45 fee for NXPowerLite Desktop 8 – that’s per user, not computer. And I’ve been happy ever since with this compression utility – drag and drop, and click “Optimise” – and a lot of pain to receiving students is prevented, in PDF or PPT.
NXPowerLite app works on both macOS or Windows.
Otterman speaks... 