I’m documenting this here in case someone else has the same problem. Today I wrote a ten-page response to a government motion, and when I saved it (from MS Word 2011) to PDF format it was over 5 megabytes—too big to be filed via ECF. Poking around The Google, I found a suggestion that I save it first as a Postscript file, then open that with Preview.

After trying that, and other things in the same vein, I found a better solution: save the file as a .doc file (Word ’97-2004 format), then save that as a PDF, all within MS Word. Here’s how a smaller document sizes out:

The document (three and a half pages) saved in .DOC format takes up 37 kilobytes; the PDF of that document is even smaller, at 27 KB.

Save it as a .DOCX instead, and it bloats to 118 KB. Save that to PDF and three and a half pages of text take up a staggering 494 KB—more than eighteen times as big as it needs to be.

Astounding. What the hell is wrong with Microsoft?