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alleluia20

Member

Registered: 2009-04-13

Posts: 53

Make an image-rich PDF more lightweight (to be able to print it)?

Hello,

I printed an email displayed on firefox as a PDF and sent it to another person for him to print it. Such email was a receipt of an online purchase and included several images, even the details of the purchase were inside an image. The resulting PDF takes one page and a half and its size is 1.1 MB, and the addressee advised me that his printer (a good, laser postcript printer) was unable to print it.

So the question is: how can I make this PDF more lightweight? Given that it takes one page and a half, reducing it to around 200 kB should not spoil the quality in a very noticeable way, I think... I tried opening the PDF and printing it as another PDF, but it was only reduced to 750 kB. Doing pdf2ps and ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen even increases the resulting PDF to 4 MB!

Any ideas? It would be very useful both for space economy and not "killing" the printers.

Thank you very much in advance.

tlaloc

Member

From: Lower Saxony

Registered: 2006-05-12

Posts: 359

Re: Make an image-rich PDF more lightweight (to be able to print it)?

pdftk should allow you to cut that into printable slices. Just google it.

alleluia20

Member

Registered: 2009-04-13

Posts: 53

Re: Make an image-rich PDF more lightweight (to be able to print it)?

Sorry, I did not find any useful capability for my problem in pdftk. I found two possibilities. First, to reduce the PDF maintaining a decent resolution:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -sOutputFile=output.pdf -f input.pdf

More info: http://www.ghostscript.com/~ghostgum/pdftips.htm

If that is not enough, you can force a lower resolution for the images with:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dDownsampleColorImages=true -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Average -dColorImageDownsampleThreshold=1.0 -dColorImageResolution=36 -sOutputFile=output.pdf -f input.pdf

There are similar settings for Gray and Mono images. Replace "1.0" and "36" above as you need. More info: http://www.ghostscript.com/~ghostgum/pdftips.htm , http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Ps2pdf.htm

The problem is that, with both commands, the output is not text-searchable any more (although input.pdf was). Any ideas how to fix this?