Linux PDF/Postscript Optimizing

Question

So I have a report system built using Java and iText. PDF templates are created using Scribus. The Java code merges the data into the document using iText. The files are then copied over to a NFS share, and a BASH script prints them.

I use acroread to convert them to PS, then lpr the PS.

The FOSS application pdftops is horribly inefficient.

My main problem is that the PDF's generated using iText/Scribus are very large. And I've recently run into the problem where acroread pukes because it hits 4gb of mem usage on large (300+ pages) documents. (Adobe is painfully slow at updating stuff to 64 bit).

Now I can use Adobe reader on Windows, and use the Reduce file size option or whatever its called, and it greatly(> 10x) reduces the size of the PDF(it removes alot of metadata about form fields and such it appears) and produces a PDF that is basically a Print image.

My question is does anyone know of a good solution/program for doing something similiar on Linux. Ideally, it would optimize the PDF, reduce size, and reduce PS complexity so the printer could print faster as it takes about 15-20 seconds a page to print right now.

Answer 1

gs \
  -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen \
  -dNOPAUSE \
  -dBATCH \
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -sOutputFile=output.pdf \
   input.pdf

Ghostscript seems to work for most for this issue. I'm having a different problem now with ghostscript garbling the embedded fonts, but I'll open a new question for that.

Answer 2

To reduce the size of a PDF file, use pdfsizeopt, the software I am developing. pdfsizeopt runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows (and possibly on other systems as well).

pdfsizeopt has lots of dependencies, so it might be a bit cumbersome to install (about 10 minutes of your time). I'm working on making installation easier.

If you need something quickly, you can try one of its dependencies: Multivalent tool.pdf.Compress, which is a pure Java tool.

Get Multivalent20060102.jar, install Java and run

java -cp Multivalent20060102.jar tool.pdf.Compress input.pdf

There are limitations on what gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite can do:

• it can't generate xref streams (so the PDF will be larger than necessary)
• it can't generate object streams (so the PDF will be larger than necessary)
• it doesn't deduplicate images or other objects (i.e., if the same image appears multiple times in the input PDF, gs makes a copy in the output for each occurrence)
• it emits images suboptimally
• it re-samples images to low resolution
• it sometimes omits hyperlinks in the PDF
• it can't convert some constructs (so the output PDF may be visually different from the input)

Neither pdfsizeopt nor Multivalent's tool.pdf.Compress suffer from these limitations.