Outputting a PDF from Filemaker, which then pops up as an attachment in Mail ready to email to send to someone, is a potentially massive productivity benefit for my users. I can make it all happen correctly, but there's one problem.... PDFs that are only one or two pages long, and only contain text, come out at filesizes of between 600k and several megabytes.

Our repro team have some advanced PDF manipulation tools and can low res the files down to 50 or 60k and they look and print fine.

How can I control the pdf resolution/file size from within Filemaker. (We're using Filemaker 8.03 on Macs generally running 10.3 or 10.4)

Thanks in anticipation

The filemaker.com KnowledgeBase has an article explaining the issue:

http://filemaker.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/filemaker.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5700&p_created=1135189504&p_sid=dzoH7q8i&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MjUmcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0mcF9wdj0mcF9jdj0mcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9ubCZwX3BhZ2U9MSZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PXBkZiA4&p_li=&p_topview=1

Not to be a wet blanket or complainer, but... I have read the knowledge base article and I don't use those fonts and find that the internal generated pdf to be on average 5x the size of output with other pdf printers. Storage is cheap but 5x needs to be on a diet. I can't say if it got better on Mac, but in Windows it didn't change. 8.0v3 Advanced.

This is a known issue for which FileMaker, Inc. is investigating. Maybe someone else has more information. That's all I have after searching the FSA Talk archives.

I'm not using the fonts mentioned in the knowledgebase article either... I switched from the ones I was using (Franklin Gothic) to Univers and the file sizes were still 5 to 10 times what they should be. So switching fonts doesn't help.

Can anyone from Filemaker shed light on when this might be fixed? Send to PDF is such a great feature but badly hampered by this problem.

Not much help here, but an interesting fact. Using FM8Ad/WinXP my 7 page with logo graphic report in Tahoma is 14.9 MB. Using BullZip Printer, the same report is 1.01 MB and doesn't cause the system to pause and display dialog about saving as PDF.

Bump....

7 months ago, any luck with this? I have to open each file in Acrobat and use the Save File As... feature.

-clm

There is a tool freely availiable claiming to do this, via the commandline in the OS ...

http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Tools/index.html

You'd better consult how to do this under windows, by getting the tips from Wims page:

http://www.connectingdata.com/downloads.htm

...where it's the VBScript integration your task should be exploiting.

--sd