pdftk compression option

Question

I use pdftk to compress a pdf using the following command line  pdftk file1 pdf output file2 pdf compress   It works as the weight of my file decreased    Are there  options  to change the compression     Or maybe other solutions to compress my file  It is heavy because some graphics have a lot of points  Is there a way to convert these graphs to jpg for instance and adapt the compression

User · Accepted Answer

I had the same problem and found two different solutions (see this thread for more details). Both reduced the size of my uncompressed PDF dramatically.

Pixelated (lossy):

convert input.pdf -compress Zip output.pdf

Unpixelated (lossless, but may display slightly differently):

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

Edit: I just discovered another option (for lossless compression), which avoids the nasty gs command. qpdf is a neat tool that converts PDFs (compression/decompression, encryption/decryption), and is much faster than the gs command:

qpdf --linearize input.pdf output.pdf

User · Answer

I had the same issue and I used this function to compress individual pages which results in the file size being compressed by upto 1 3 of the original size   for  int i   1  i  lt   theDoc PageCount  i             theDoc PageNumber   i         theDoc Flatten

User · Answer

this procedure works pretty well  pdf2ps large pdf very large ps  ps2pdf very large ps small pdf   give it a try

User · Answer

The one-line pdf2ps option  by Lee  actually increased the pdf size  However  the two steps one did better  And it can be combined in a single one using redirection from  amp  to standard input output and pipes   pdf2ps large pdf -   ps2pdf - small pdf  did reduce a PDF generated by xsane from 18 Mo to 630 ko   Links are lost  but for the present example  it s not a concern    and was the easiest way to achieve the desired result

User · Answer

After trying gpdf as nullglob suggested  I found that I got the same compression results  a  900mb file down to  30mb  by just using the cups-pdf printer  This might be easier preferred if you are already viewing a document and only need to compress one or two documents   In Ubuntu 12 04  you can install this by  sudo apt-get install cups-pdf   After installation  be sure to check in System Tools   Administration   Printing   right-click  PDF  and set it to  enable   By default  the output is saved into a folder named PDF in your home directory

User · Answer

pdf2ps large pdf small pdf is enough  instead of two steps  pdf2ps large pdf very large ps  ps2pdf very large ps small pdf   However  ps2pdf large pdf small pdf is a better choice    ps2pdf is much faster without additional parameters specified  pdf2ps sometimes produces larger file

User · Answer

In case you want to compress a PDF which contains a lot of selectable text  on Windows you can use NicePDF Compressor - choose  Flate  option  After trying everything  cpdf  pdftk  gs  it finally helped me to compress my 1360 pages PDF from 500 MB down to 10 MB

User · Answer

Trying to compress a PDF I made with 400ppi tiffs  mostly 8-bit  a few 24-bit  with PackBits compression  using tiff2pdf compressed with Zip Deflate  One problem I had with every one of these methods  none of the above methods preserved the bookmarks TOC that I painstakingly manually created in Acrobat Pro X  Not even the recommended ebook setting for gs  Sure  I could just open a copy of the original with the TOC intact and do a Replace pages but unfortunately  none of these methods did a satisfactory job to begin with  Either they reduced the size so much that the quality was unacceptably pixellated  or they didn t reduce the size at all and in one case actually increased it despite quality loss   pdftk compress   no change in size bookmarks TOC are gone   gs screen   takes a ridiculously long time and 100  CPU errors      sfopen  gs parse file name failed                                             base gsicc manage c 1651  gsicc set device profile    cannot find device profile 74 8MB-- gt 10 2MB hideously pixellated bookmarks TOC are gone   gs printer   takes a ridiculously long time and 100  CPU no errors 74 8MB-- gt 66 1MB light blue background on pages 1-4 bookmarks TOC are gone   gs ebook   errors      sfopen  gs parse file name failed          base gsicc manage c 1050  gsicc open search    Could not find default rgb ic          base gsicc manage c 1651  gsicc set device profile    cannot find device profile 74 8MB-- gt 32 2MB badly pixellated bookmarks TOC are gone   qpdf --linearize   very fast  a few seconds no size change bookmarks TOC are gone   pdf2ps   took very long time output pdf2ps ps 74 8MB-- gt 331 6MB   ps2pdf   pretty fast 74 8MB-- gt 79MB very slightly degraded with sl  bluish background bookmarks TOC are gone

User · Answer

If file size is still too large it could help using ps2pdf to downscale the resolution of the produced pdf file   pdf2ps input pdf tmp ps ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS  screen -dDownsampleColorImages true -dColorImageResolution 200 -dColorImageDownsampleType  Bicubic tmp ps output pdf   Adjust the value of the -dColorImageResolution option to achieve a result that fits your needs  the value describes the image resolution in DPIs   If your input file is in grayscale  replacing Color through Gray or using both options in the above command could also help  Further fine-tuning is possible by changing the -dPDFSETTINGS option to  default or  printer  For explanations of the all possible options consult the ps2pdf manual

User · Answer

I didn t see a lot of reduction in file size using qpdf  The best way I found is after pdftk is done use ghostscript to convert pdf to postscript then back to pdf  In PHP you would use exec    ps    save path   psfile ps   exec  ps2ps2      pdf          ps   unlink  pdf   exec  ps2pdf     ps          pdf   unlink  ps     I used this a few minutes ago to take pdftk output from 490k to 71k

[compression] pdftk compression option

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Examples related to pdftk