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I have some PDF-files that I would like to shrink. The biggest is 1.2 MB, but I need it to be smaller than 1 MB. Any suggestions as to how? (Terminal commands would be awesome)

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2 Answers

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ghostscript! It is probably already installed (*) otherwise use sudo apt-get install ghostscript.

Command line to reduce file size:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

  • I do not know if you can get the 1.2 Mb below 1 Mb with this though. Probably depends on the content if it does;
  • Replace output.pdf and input.pdf to your pdf names.

(*)

$gs
GPL Ghostscript 9.01 (2011-02-07)
Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
GS>^C

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I don't see how this will reduce the size of my files? All I can gather from that command line is that you just reprint the file using gs. Could you explain a little further? – Ole Christian May 7 '11 at 7:43
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I reduced a size of some pdf by importing them to OpenOffice (LibreOffice), and then exporting to PDF format with increased JPEG compression.

Good luck. Vincenzo

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Could you explain a little further how you imported them? I tried opening the pdf in LibreOffice, and it asked for some ASCII parameters which I just clicked OK on. Then, all I got was a bunch of gibberish in a very long document (The PDF is one page). – Ole Christian May 7 '11 at 7:52

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