Archive for November, 2017

Recompress Update 17.11

Monday, November 27th, 2017

After releasing our initial PDF Re/compress we received praise by first customers and users - and one popular questions: Can you actually reduce the quality much, much more?!

Our initial Re/compress will go thru all the PDF’s objects, and re-writes them in a much more compact and compressed way and also potentially recover and fix some broken files. It would also allow to reduce compression quality and down-sample the image’s resolution.

However, some interested inquires intentionally wanted way worse, smaller, and thus faster to load files. One of the most popular reason? AutoCAD CAD drawing! Those users usually use some print to PDF driver that usually results in tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of vector segments, but also potentially many small, few pixel sized (inline, sigh) image dots from 3d renderings and such. Those would usually not compress very much in our original version. This files also actually cause popular PDF viewers, like Apple’s Preview and naturally even more so Adobe’s Acrobat to hang while it was drawing all this many page content for seconds - panning and zooming was also not a very snappy affair.

Meet Re/compres 17.11 - our first major update: A newly developed “Rasterize pages to bitmap graphics” pass will convert this huge amounts of objects to just a single, highly compressed image. Using the down-sample resolution option you can create a new compressed file, intentionally with “photocopier” like reduced quality. Particularly useful when you want to mail documents to public tenders and potential clients without them having to expose all the fine, zoomable details of the original vector file!

We hope Re/compress and all its features can help you in your daily office workflow, and if you have any other wish or inquiry just let us know, too!

Re/compress PDF.

Apple’s macOS Preview default to 100% scale

Wednesday, November 8th, 2017

You sometimes need to print documents, invoices, boarding passes, whatever? Using Apple’s macOS Preview.app and tired of having to choose: “Scale: 100%” to have an accurate printout instead of the often arbitrary default of: “Scale to Fit: 97%” or 98% (likely due to content on margins outside of your printer’s printable page size)?

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode 0
defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingAutoRotate 0

Yep. The famous Apple usability and attention to details ;-)