Compress PDF
Article by on April 3, 2012, last modified on October 31, 2013
The most customizable and effective option I found was Option 4 with ImageMagick.
Option 1: pdftk
$ pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf compress
Option 2: pdf2ps->ps2pdf
$ pdf2ps input.pdf output.ps
$ ps2pdf output.ps output.pdf
Option 3: Mac's Preview With Quartz Filter
Open the PDF and click File->Save As and select "Reduce File Size" under "Quartz Filter".
You can add other quartz filters using the "ColorSync Utility":
- http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/33702/compress-pdf-with-adjustable-ratio
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18L8nJQqh5g
Option 4: ghostscript
$ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
Option 5: convert (ImageMagick)
$ convert -compress JPEG -quality 100 -density 100x100 input.pdf output.pdf
You can tweak compression by changing the quality lower (more compressed) or higher (less compressed) and the density lower (more compressed) or higher (less compressed).
Some other options:
http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/DataDiscussions/archives/2011/03/how_to_compress.html