I was scanning some contract documents with the Doxie scanner (review coming really soon) which can transform them into PDFs. I chose 300 dpi which made the PDF document looked great, but it’s 47 MB in size! I didn’t want to go through scanning the contract all over again so I’ve been trying to find out how to reduce a PDF file size.
I couldn’t find a good solution in Windows unless if I download a trial or purchase a software but it seems like there is a free alternative in Linux/UNIX using GhostScript to reduce the file size of a PDF.
Simply type this command:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=OutputFile.pdf Input.pdf
It lowered the file size from 47 MB to 4 MB! Now, the quality was of course lowered here. It was still readable although a little bit blurry. I couldn’t find a better command to make it higher though so if you can give your opinion on this one, I’d appreciate it.
The size of 4 MB seems reasonable to pass it around to my financier and solicitor (which I did after running the command). Hope this little info helps if you are trying to make your PDF file smaller to email it around.
Source: Ubuntu Tip
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