Compressing PDFs on Macs Let’s say you have a pdf file with large embedded images in…

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:15:00 +0100

Compressing PDFs on Macs

Let’s say you have a pdf file with large embedded images in it and you’d like to reduce the filesize a bit, here’s how to do it using the command line.

Install ghostscript via Homebrew:

brew install gs

Create a shell script, let’s call it pdf2smol:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
 echo "Usage: pdf2smol input.pdf [output.pdf] [resolution (default: 150)]"
 exit
fi

if [ -z "$2" ]; then
 output="output.pdf"
else
 output=$2
fi

if [ -z "$3" ]; then
 resolution=150
else
 resolution=$3
fi

set -x

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dColorImageResolution=$resolution \
-sOutputFile="$output" "$1"

Shell Scripting on Arcanelab Blog

Compressing PDFs on Macs Let’s say you have a pdf file with large embedded images in…

Compressing PDFs on Macs