Jounce

Crunching Huge Keynote Files into Tiny PDFs

So, in the last post, I talked a little about my Web 2.0 Expo talk in NYC. After my talk, I was asked to submit my slides so they could distribute them. Exporting my Keynote file to PDF yielded a file somewhere around 25mb. The uploading system wouldn’t take anything above 15mb, and the e-mail system at O’Reilly apparently only accepts 10mb files, so I couldn’t even send it that way.

It was suggested by the O’Reilly folks that it might be worth removing the backgrounds or other images involved in the slides, but that wasn’t a solution, as far as I was concerned. I tried a few other methods, like saving each slide out as a JPEG and then making a PDF from those, but nothing was really doing it.

The Light of Knowledge Thus Did Shine Upon My Head

Then, I did something I should have done right away: I asked Ali. Her design skills and experience don’t end on the web — when she worked as a print designer, she had to deal with PDFs in all sorts of ways, often needing to shrink them down just like this.

Moments later, I had a 3mb PDF of my slides with almost no noticeable compression. Problem solved. Since then, a few other people have asked me about the same issue, so I figured I’d share the secret. The only prerequisite is finding someone who has Acrobat Pro.

Nothing crazy here, but it was a tool I’d never used before, and have used a decent number of times since then. And using Distiller is great and all if you have it, but I know lots of folks don’t. Anyone have a good way to shrink a PDF like this using free-ish tools?