steveroyle, 2 months ago

@andrewplested ha ha! Do you need to get it under 10 MB? Colorsync Utility on Mac can work wonders if you're looking for an alternative.

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

@steveroyle @andrewplested

There is also a ghostscript command line for different pdf compression levels.

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

where "screen" is probably too compressed. Alternatives are "ebook", "printer", "prepress". (It may be possible to bump the CompatibilityLevel to 1.5). Not very fine-grained, but it can compress a lot and all elements are compressed consistently for the output

nicolaromano, 2 months ago

@BorisBarbour @steveroyle @andrewplested a couple of other options I used in the past (these work on Linux, not sure about Mac sorry).
Depending on how the PDF was generated some work better than others

1. use pdftk

pdftk inputfile.pdf -o outputfile.pdf compress

2. convert to postscript then back to pdf

pdf2ps inputfile.pdf output.ps
ps2pdf output.ps inputfile_small.pdf

3. use qpdf

qpdf --linearize inputfile.pdf output.pdf