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mammuth/compress-pdf-with-gs.md

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Last active August 11, 2023 19:59
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Compress PDF files with ghostscript
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compress-pdf-with-gs.md

This can reduce files to ~15% of their size (2.3M to 345K, in one case) with no obvious degradation of quality.

ghostscript -r72 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/default -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dCompressFonts=true -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

Change -r for the resolution.

Other options for PDFSETTINGS:

  • /screen selects low-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Screen Optimized" setting.
  • /ebook selects medium-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "eBook" setting.
  • /printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Print Optimized" setting.
  • /prepress selects output similar to Acrobat Distiller "Prepress Optimized" setting.
  • /default selects output intended to be useful across a wide variety of uses, possibly at the expense of a larger output file.

Source: http://ghostscript.com/doc/current/Ps2pdf.htm

On Mac: brew install ghostscript. And use gs instead of ghostscript!

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