[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)

This is not strictly compression, but it is efficiency, which has a
similar end result.

I was just fluffing around on the command line and stumbled across
'pdfopt'

man pdfopt: 

DESCRIPTION
pdfopt  uses  gs(1) to convert the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
file "input.pdf" to a so-called optimized form in "output.pdf".   Opti-
mization  puts  the  elements  of the file into a more linear order and
adds "hint" pointers, allowing Adobe's Acrobat(TM) products to  display
individual  pages  of  the  file  more  quickly when accessing the file
through a network.

Alrighty then:

gs -dNODISPLAY -- pdfopt.ps input.pdf output.pdf

I tried it on some PDFs that gs produced and it had no effect as they
are already optimised, and I don't have any 'bad' PDFs around to try.

Worth a look.

Ryan