Quickly flattening an atlas of vector PDFs

flatten_atlas.sh

#!/bin/bash

# This will convert PDF atlases to .pngs and then convert them back to .PDF, now rasterized.
# Use this script to flatten PDF exports from QGIS so you can generate thumbnails for the Mapfolio

# This script uses imagemagick and ghostscript.
# Please note: Ghostscript does not automatically come installed with imagemagick. Run 'brew install gs' to install it.

## Atlas Conversion

ls -1 *.pdf | parallel convert -density 150 '{}' -quality 90 -alpha remove '{.}.png'

ls -1 *.pdf | rm '{}'

ls -1 *.png | parallel convert '{}' '{.}.pdf'

mkdir ../Flattened_atlas

mv *.pdf ../Flattened_atlas

echo "Done! Atlas flattened and moved to a new 'Flattened_atlas' folder"