hpr2708 :: Ghostscript
Klaatu talks about manipulating PDFs with gs and pdf-stapler
Hosted by Klaatu on Wednesday, 2018-12-19 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
pdf, ebook, bloat, print.
2.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2708
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Duration: 00:22:31
Privacy and Security.
In this open series, you can contribute shows that are on the topic of Privacy and Security
Ghostscript is the open source implementation of Postscript. You can read its docs online.
To compress a big PDF into something possibly smaller:
$ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf example.pdf
That renders basically the same PDF with all images down-res'd to 72 DPI. Other valid setting profiles are ebook, printer, and prepress.
To render a version of a PDF without any raster images in it, making it cheaper and faster to print:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dBATCH -dFILTERIMAGE -sOutputFile=output.pdf example.pdf
The FILTERIMAGE option drops raster images from the file. The FILTERVECTOR option filters vector images, and FILTERTEXT filters text.
If pdftk is not available for your OS, you can use pdf-stapler instead for cutting and concatenating PDF files. It doesn't deal with metadata as well as pdftk does, however.
It's worth noting that pdftk is available as a snap package https://snapcraft.io/pdftk.
It's also worth noting that this is actually episode 2 in a series about steganography.