Wednesday, June 10, 2009

On Reducing the File Size of a PDF

For SoFoBoMo, I need to upload a PDF of my book that is less than 15 megabytes. Since I intend to print my book, the PDF at high-res is 90 megabytes! After some research, I found that ghostscript can down-size PDFs by reducing the resolution of the images it contains. Here's the command to downsize Portraits.pdf (90MB) to Portraits_low.pdf (8MB):

gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=Portraits_low.pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook Portraits.pdf
Posted by at
Labels: ,

2 comments:

  1. aaJune 10, 2009 at 2:23 AM

    If you use SCRIBUS, you could follow this article by Doonster for reducing the output file size without having too many quality reuction issues:

    http://doonster.blogspot.com/2009/05/scribus-output-pdf-and-jpeg.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nick BurlettJune 10, 2009 at 8:24 AM

    I used Aperture's built-in book creation feature. I hadn't seem Scribus before, it looks like a useful replacement for InDesign... I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)