Ever need ot send someone a PDF file, but it’s a tad too large? On Ubuntu Linux, you can install ghostscript (if it’s not already), then use this command to shrink your large PDFs:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=compressed_PDF_file.pdf input_PDF_file.pdf
Apparently, there are 3 PDF settings you can have:
- /prepress – results in large pdf files (why?!?)
- /screen – smaller pdf files
- /ebook – medium size
I decided to go with /screen and the results were fantastic. It took a 101 meg PDF file and dropped it down to 13megs. WOW. The /prepress option got me to 99 megs. Meh. The /ebook option was 22 megs. I honestly couldn’t see much difference between /screen and /ebook compression.
Special thanks to ITsFoss blog entry, How to Compress PDF in Linux. Great instructions and works great.
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