[plug] pdf compression

[Ryan]

On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 16:17, Brad Hill wrote:
> Does anyone know if there's a linux utility that can open a pdf file,
> compress it's innards and save it back as a pdf file?  (I know this is
> theoretically possible since there's options to use LZW, ZIP, JPEG etc
> compression when writing pdfs)

Short of pdf2ps <-> ps2pdf juggling I don't know of any simple solutions
on Linux .. but I'm not exactly looking so there may well be. 
Converting PDFs back to PS and then to PDF again normally results in
HUGE PDFs, but I've seen rare cases where the effect is the opposite.

There are PHP, Perl and Java libraries for all this too, if you ever get
bored for several months straight.  They might be the easiest way to
strip out unneeded embedded fonts though.

I've done said acts with Acrobat 5.0 and tweaked every setting to max
compression and the results were not worth the effort IMHO.  Unless it
was deliberately and grossly uncompressed or converted using incorrect
techniques (like using distiller when you shouldn't) the cost saving was
rarely worth it.

I'm happy to hear any successful findings though :)

Ryan