This can reduce files to ~15% of their size (2.3M to 345K, in one case) with no obvious degradation of quality.
ghostscript -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
Other options for PDFSETTINGS:
- /screen selects low-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Screen Optimized" setting.
- /ebook selects medium-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "eBook" setting.
- /printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Print Optimized" setting.
- /prepress selects output similar to Acrobat Distiller "Prepress Optimized" setting.
- /default selects output intended to be useful across a wide variety of uses, possibly at the expense of a larger output file.
I used current ghostscript version 9.25 (2018-09-13) to reduce the size of a PDF that contains hyperlinks to several URLs, as well as hyperlinks to several points inside the PDF. Ghostscript reduces the file size substantially, BUT destroys all the hyperlinks. Any ideas, any hints, please?