Huge File Size

How come, a letter (word file) I convert into .pdf, having a size of
64kb, after the last update (2.0) now measures 640kb? how can I change
the settings? I can’t find it… or is it the jpeg compression setting
(I don’t think so) ?

I have the same problem. A 13 page document that was about 230 kb when printed with version 1.7.3 is now 13,046 and with high compression it is still 12,963!

Me too, and this gets very strange - it seems to depend upon which version of PowerPoint prints the file to PDF creator.  I get much better image compression from ppt 2003 than from ppt 2010.  From ppt 2003 the new PDFCreator has compression similar to the previous version I was using.  This is when processing the exact same .pptx file.

Here are the details.

I had an older PDFCreator version installed (1.2something) and I just upgraded to 2.02 of PDFCreator.  The compressed size of a test file with, as far as I can tell, the same settings (it erased my existing profiles on the upgrade) went from 2.5 Mb to 6.2 Mb, using JPEG HIGH compression.  The size for High Quality 15.4Mb and High Compression with resample to 150 bpi is 5.7Mb.  (This is I think JPEG MAXIMUM compression).  The 6.2 was JPEG high compression with resample to 300 bpi.  Adobe Acrobat makes a 2.0 Mb file.

I used these scripts (be patient if you use them, they are not fast)

  http://saf.bio.caltech.edu/pub/software/linux_or_unix_tools/pdfsummary.tar.gz

to get a summary of the 6.2 Mb one mentioned above, made by 2.02 from PowerPoint 2010, with these results:

Object Summary:
  Number:         330
  MaxVal:         330
  Sizes
    Total:          6191715
    PageSpecific:   6161510
      Images:       5913958
    Global-Fonts:     27057
    Global-Other:      3148

Then the same tools were used to examine almost the same file (a few minor text changes)
made last year with the previous 1.2something PDF creator, 2.56Mb, from PowerPoint 2003

Object Summary:
  Number:         236
  MaxVal:         236
  Sizes
    Total:          2565431
    PageSpecific:         0
      Images:       2062279
    Global-Fonts:         0
    Global-Other:   2565431

This is the acrobat produced file today from PowerPoint 2010, which was set to use jpeg2000:

Object Summary:
  Number:         1523
  MaxVal:         1523
  Sizes
    Total:          1988899
    PageSpecific:         0
      Images:       1720780
    Global-Fonts:     34239
    Global-Other:   1954660

From this we can see a couple of things.  First the image compression is only 1/3 as good as it was previously.  Not sure why, since the image compression is enabled and neither JPEG HIGH nor MAXIMUM makes a big dent.  Also the organization of the PDF file seems to be quite different.  It was generated from within PowerPoint 2010 from a pptx this time, last time it might have been from PowerPoint 2003.  So, to be thorough, I generated one more from PowerPoint 2003 using the same high compression settings - and it came out at 2.6Mb, within spitting distance of what it was last year!  Analyze that one:

Object Summary:
  Number:         326
  MaxVal:         326
  Sizes
    Total:          2679599
    PageSpecific:   2661163
      Images:       2395282
    Global-Fonts:     15310
    Global-Other:      3126