Ok, so I don’t know why this works, but it does and I haven’t seen any decrease in quality. I suspect converting from PDF to PS and back just optimizes the PDF.
Requirements
- pdftk for linux
The Process
- Convert your PDF to PS (this creates a large file
- Convert the new PS back to a PDF
pdf2ps large.pdf very_large.ps
ps2pdf very_large.ps small.pdf
Results
large.pdf : 6.3MB
very_large.ps : 53.4MB
small.pdf : 2.4MB
Looks like pretty good compression to me.
If anyone knows why this works so well, please let me know.
9 responses so far ↓
Jasper // July 16, 2008 at 9:19 pm |
I guess there is some quality loss during the process. Losing lines and curves just having bitmaps …
dude // July 30, 2008 at 11:21 pm |
pdftk is also able to uncompress and compress a pdf (see those options for the ‘pdftk’ binary) which should simply uncompress and recompress the data within the pdf to produce a smaller pdf — but not as small as the improvement you got.
Oscar Sandoval Torres // November 28, 2008 at 3:02 pm |
This method not always work, in my case the resulted PDF is bigger.
attila82 // January 24, 2009 at 5:41 pm |
Very good!
thanks
Paco // June 26, 2009 at 2:39 pm |
I don’t know what happends during the process but it helps me a lot
Great!
Thanks
caqui // July 21, 2009 at 2:40 am |
it blanked the top edges of all pages…
Les // August 4, 2009 at 1:16 am |
Thank you sooooo very very much for those instructions! I had this pdf file that was, believe it or not, 747 Mb in size. After using your instructions, I got myself a file that was ONLY 11 Mb in size without any loss in quality to the file! Thank you again!
ubundom // November 29, 2009 at 1:17 am |
handy 6MB->227KB
Mitsos // December 1, 2009 at 9:12 am |
Its one and a half years since your post…but still helping people
Thanks.