

Pdfsizeopt: PDF file size optimizer - imurray
http://code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt/

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imurray
I just found pdfsizeopt.py, which doesn't seem to be that well known(?). It's
reduced the size of most of my PDFs.

    
    
        pdfsizeopt.py --do-unify-fonts=false --do-unify-pages=false infile.pdf
    

The first option is _important_ : several of my PDFs were horribly corrupted
without it. The second option prevents a (benign?) error message with some
PDFs in xpdf/poppler.

Small files dominated by complicated fonts can be reduced several times. Very
large PDFs with raster images can also be made much smaller, unless you
obsessively squished the graphics before including them:
[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/squish_imag...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/squish_images.html)

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imurray
An unrelated tip for people that use TeX and want good PDFs. If you have an
old .ps file with bitmap fonts from dvips, and can't recompile the .tex
source, it's still possible to get a nice PDF with Type 1 fonts:

    
    
        pkfix-helper input.ps tmp.ps
        pkfix tmp.ps output.ps
    

output.ps will now have Type 1 fonts, and can be converted to a good PDF with
ps2pdf. The pkfix-helper man page says how to check and tweak the font
substitutions.

