Bash functions to compress pdf files

compress-pdf.sh

## Bash functions to compress pdf files
## Usage:
## $ source compress-pdf.sh
## $ compress-pdf-medium
function compress-pdf-medium {
  # Medium level compression
  # Medium does mean it's the medium quality level
  gs \
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
    -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
    -dNOPAUSE \
    -dBATCH \
    -sOutputFile=$2 \
    $1 
}
function compress-pdf-low {
  # Low level compression
  # Low does mean it's the lowest quality level
  gs \
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
    -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen \
    -dNOPAUSE \
    -dBATCH \
    -sOutputFile=$2 \
    $1 
}
function compress-pdf-high {
  # High level compression
  # High does mean it's the highest quality level
  gs \
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
    -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen \
    -dNOPAUSE \
    -dBATCH \
    -sOutputFile=$2 \
    $1 
}

Some bash functions for pdf files compression

Prerequisites

• Ghostscript (PostScript and PDF language interpreter and previewer) apt-get install ghostscript

Usage

$ curl https://gist.github.com/4383/4a8f03a2425d0908d0ae073d58a07c56/raw/1f0b4a39d1fcca24b0b5f359929c6dd7cffbe0f4/compress-pdf.sh -o ~/.compress-pdf.sh
$ source ~/.compress-pdf.sh
$ compress-pdf-medium input.pdf output.pdf

Persistant configuration

You can source automaticaly these functions by adding the following command to your ~/.bashrc:

source ~/.compress-pdf.sh