Prev: Unison -- Problem Marking Messages As Read
Next: Delete Duplicate Mail Messages
From: Frank on 10 Feb 2010 06:02
V10.6.2
When I highlight a 2.7 mb file on desktop and click on compress on
finder file pulldown menu the result is a 2.6 mb zip. That is hardly
worth the effort when I need a file less than 1 mb in size. Is this
the best it can do, or am I missing some technique?
From: Jamie Kahn Genet on 10 Feb 2010 06:58
Frank <gno52(a)windstream.net> wrote:

> V10.6.2
> When I highlight a 2.7 mb file on desktop and click on compress on
> finder file pulldown menu the result is a 2.6 mb zip. That is hardly
> worth the effort when I need a file less than 1 mb in size. Is this
> the best it can do, or am I missing some technique?

Well it's not magic :-) If the items are JPEG files, H.264 video or MP3
music files (to give just a few of many examples) then they're already
highly compressed formats, leaving little benefit to further applying
lossless compression (which is what the ZIP format uses) to them. If on
the other hand the items are text files, say, then it's likely ZIPing
them will result in much smaller files.

In other words it all depends on the format of the files you're trying
to zip. If the format already includes substantial compression there
won't be much more lossless (compression that throws no information
away) compression can do. This is common for most video, photo and audio
formats you'll encounter, unless you work with digital photo, video or
music editing where uncompressed high quality versions are typically
used before outputting a final smaller lossy (throws information away to
achieve a smaller file size) compressed product.

So what is it you're trying to compress?

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet
--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
From: Frank on 10 Feb 2010 09:53

> So what is it you're trying to compress?
.pdf files
From: Jamie Kahn Genet on 10 Feb 2010 10:20
Frank <gno52(a)windstream.net> wrote:

> > So what is it you're trying to compress?
> .pdf files

If they're image packed (1) PDFs those images are very likely highly
compressed, so that would explain your results.

In that case you could use software to rip the PDF apart and re-compress
the images even smaller in size (and therefore lose image quality),
remove uneeded embedded elements, etc.

Or you could compress and archive the PDF into several parts using
various utilities.

But if you're just trying to just get under a mailbox size limitation
when emailing this file or something similar, I'd sugest simply throwing
the PDF up online and sending a link to the person you want to look at
it. I recommend DropBox <http://www.dropbox.com> for this sort of work -
it's dead easy to install and use :-) Plus it's free for the first 2GB
of storage.

HTH,
Jamie Kahn Genet

(1) PLus some poorly made PDFs the text is actually images - also done
by the annoyingly paranoid obbssesed with trying to stop people from
copying said text - hello? Heard of OCR? ;-)
--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
From: Steve Hix on 10 Feb 2010 12:58
In article
<593c0644-7783-49ca-a779-c4e3247f86cd(a)z26g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
Frank <gno52(a)windstream.net> wrote:

> V10.6.2
> When I highlight a 2.7 mb file on desktop and click on compress on
> finder file pulldown menu the result is a 2.6 mb zip. That is hardly
> worth the effort when I need a file less than 1 mb in size. Is this
> the best it can do, or am I missing some technique?

Completely depends on the source being compressed. Some things, like
jpeg files, may not compress much at all, other types of files can
compress a lot.
 |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2
Prev: Unison -- Problem Marking Messages As Read
Next: Delete Duplicate Mail Messages