Does OS X Preview support saving PDF with JBIG2 compression?

Question

I have a PDF file containing hundreds of BW scannings, that I created on Windows using lossy JBIG2 compression, resulting in a nice 8MB file.

I can open that file on OSX with Preview, but if I add any comment or annotation and save the file, the resulting size is 120MB. If I make the same annotation with Acrobat Reader, the resulting file size is 8MB.

I guess the problem is that Preview saves the BW images using CCITT compression, which has a worse compression ratio. Am I correct? Are there any workarounds for this?

I'm using OS X Mountain Lion, latest update.

Answer 1

The problem appears to be that Preview saves in 1.3 format, which does not support use of JBIG2 (introduced in 1.4). Until Mac upgrades Preview to save as a later version, you won't be able to use JBIG2 compression.

Answer 2

As you have discovered the Preview app can display PDFs that use JBIG2 compression but when the PDFs are exported or saved after changes have been made the JBIG2 compression is replaced with a different compression filter.

Here's an example of a PDF that used JBIG2 compression before and after exporting it in the Preview app.

When you export a PDF from the Preview app you can specify a Quartz Filter. There is one option there called 'Reduce File Size' but this uses a DCTDecode filter instead of JBIG2Decode. It does reduce the file size substantially, but in my testing the quality of image in the PDF after it has been exported is not very good at all.