2017-09-06 PDF File Size

My Halberds and Helmets Referee Guide PDF is 40MB. If you open the PDF using *Preview*, you can use *Export...* and specify the Filter *Reduce File Size*. The resulting file is 2.9MB! That is so much more reasonable. Apparently, Ghostscript can do it, too. Let’s look at the result.

Halberds and Helmets

Ghostscript can do it, too

First, we need to pick a reference. Let’s take the giant crab’s pincer.

Image 1

Enhance! Enhance! Notice the details.

Image 2

Open the new file and find the same spot.

Image 3

I think this is good enough.

​#Publishing ​#PDF

• *2024-11-01**. For future reference, let me just copy the Ghostscript invocation:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
   -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE \
   -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=small.pdf \
   big.pdf

The `-dPDFSETTINGS` option controls the quality.

• `/screen` is screen-view-only quality, 72 dpi images
• `/ebook` is low quality, 150 dpi images
• `/printer` is high quality, 300 dpi images
• `/prepress` is high quality, color preserving, 300 dpi images
• `/default` is almost identical to `/screen`