Tags: scripting November 25, 2008    

Recently, someone asked me to make a pdf file smaller. Figuring that out was kind of fun. Interestingly enough, the fastest and most effective way that I have found is to convert the file to postscript and then convert back to pdf through the pdf2ps and ps2pds commands. That cuts down the size of the file by a factor of three somehow. Adding the -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen setting cuts down the size even further. Alternatively, a slightly smaller file can be generated by a combination of downsampling all images (i.e. -dDownsampleColorImages=true -dDownsampleGrayImages=true -dDownsampleGrayImages=true) and changing all the image resolutions to 72dpi. More information can be found at this page.

Copyright © 2008 Borys Bradel. All rights reserved. This post is only my possibly incorrect opinion.