Arnaud Bos arnaudbos

How to compress PDF using ghostscript

As a developer, it bothers me when someone sends me a large pdf file compared to the number of pages. Recently, I recieved a 12MB scanned document for just one letter-sized page... so I got to googlin, like I usually do, and found ghostscript!

to learn more abot ghostscript (gs): https://www.ghostscript.com/

What we are interested in, is the gs command line tool, which provides many options for manipulating PDF, but we are interested in compressign those large PDF's into small yet legible documents.

credit goes to this answer on askubuntu forum: https://askubuntu.com/questions/3382/reduce-filesize-of-a-scanned-pdf/3387#3387?newreg=bceddef8bc334e5b88bbfd17a6e7c4f9

	from Crypto.Cipher import AES
	import base64
	import hashlib
	import os

	# the block size for the cipher object; must be 16, 24, or 32 for AES
	BLOCK_SIZE = 32

	# the character used for padding--with a block cipher such as AES, the value
	# you encrypt must be a multiple of BLOCK_SIZE in length. This character is