Got a scanner. Scanning documents. 2MB for a black and white document is too big! Found a solution online:
pdf2ps -dLanguageLevel=3 document.pdf mv document.pdf document.pdf~ ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook document.pdf
The first command generates a postscript (PS) file, the second command renames the PDF file, and the third command generates a PDF from the PS file using the ebook settings. The result is that my 1.9M file shrunk to 343K.
Comments
How is the quality of the smaller PDF?
– Unnamed 2020-10-27 20:49 UTC
This messes up (or rasterizes) any alpha transparency layers in the PDF.
– Sandra Snan 2020-10-28 08:18 UTC
Of course. And colors are lost, dpi is reduced to 150, and probably more stuff. But it’s a legible copy of the document and so I’m happy. This was a “please send us a copy of this document” situation.
– Alex Schroeder 2020-10-28 09:53 UTC
Just using ps2pdf on the pdf usually works great
– Isidoro 2021-01-27 19:25 UTC