How to reduce the size of a pdf file?

Posted by Nicole on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Nicole
Published on 2012-10-28T02:48:38Z Indexed on 2012/10/28 5:25 UTC
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pdf

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ghostscript

I'm looking for a way in Ubuntu to reduce the size of a pdf (by reducing the quality of the images).

I know that this can be done in Ghostscript by typing the following command in terminal:

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

The problem is that I can't specify the quality with any accuracy. The parameter -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen is the one that decides the quality; but the alternatives are quite rigid (for example it is possible to do -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook for slightly better quality).

I'm looking for a way to reduce the size of a pdf in a way that allows me to specify the desired quality numerically. I know that this is possible in a Mac, so it must be possible in Linux -- right?

Any help would be well appreciated.

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