Wednesday, January 30, 2008

how to compress keynote presentations

When I give talks, I tend to use tons of pictures and screenshots combined with very little text. It works well with my style but has the downside of generating humongous Mac Keynote and pdf files. Sharing 100MB files is a pain.

Fortunately, thanks to the Unofficial Apple Weblog, I now have a simple solution.

  1. Export the Keynote presentation as a pdf.
  2. Open in Mac's Preview application.
  3. Choose "Save As..." and select "Reduce File Size" from the Quartz filter.
  4. There is no step 4!
There is a noticeable drop in image quality -- and shame on Apple for not allowing the user to control the amount of compression -- but it dropped my project from 70MB to 3MB, so I'm happy!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll do you one better: OpenOffice.org's Impress (a Powerpoint clone, for those who don't know), part of the FOS OpenOffice.org suite. You can open ODP (OpenDocument Presentation), PPT (MS Powerpoint), and many, many other formats. It has an Export to PDF function from the File menu that allows you to select between Lossless, JPEG (0 - 100% quality), or (and this is big) to reduce the image resolution to 72 dpi from 300 dpi. Impress also allows you to export so SWF / Flash, although there are still some issues with this feature, but quite handy for sharing simple presentations online.

Leonie said...

thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.

God.

How many fracking google searches did it take me to get here?

Andrew Atkinson said...

thank you, too. I'll try this out now.

Unknown said...

Many, many thanks! You saved me.

Zelphus said...

many thanks..

you make me a happier keynote user ;)

Simon Russell said...

You is nice man. I like you. You make my pres nice and small.