GNU/Linux

Reducing PDF file-size in GNU/Linux

I have tried several apps to compress PDF files and the best one in my opinion in terms of useability and compression is ghostscript.

Install

Run from a terminal below command if you are based on Debian and children.

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# ghostscript - interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF
apt install ghostscript

Use

Run the following command to reduce the file-size of your PDF:

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ghostscript -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/print -sOutputFile=new_file.pdf original_file.pdf

Note: You can use gs if you wish. For me it is an alias for git status.

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type ghostscript
ghostscript is /usr/bin/ghostscript

ll /usr/bin/ghostscript
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2 Sep  6 10:02 /usr/bin/ghostscript -> gs (/usr/bin/gs)

Now you have a few options here under -dPDFSettings:

  • /screen Selects low-resolution output (72 dpi), and the lowest file-size.
  • /ebook Selects medium-resolution output (150 dpi), with a medium file-size.
  • /printer and /prepress are both the high-resolution options (300 dpi), which is mainly used for printing PDFs. As you might have guessed, this option gives you the biggest file-size (yes, even bigger than your mother).

References