StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>There are a few main things that can blow up the size of a PDF on mobile devices:</p> <ul> <li>hi-resolution pictures (where lo-res would suffice)</li> <li>embedded fonts (where content would still be readable "good enough" without them)</li> <li>PDF content not required any more for the current version/view (older version of certain objects)</li> <li>embedded ICC profiles</li> <li>embedded third-party files (using the PDF as a container)</li> <li>embedded job tickets (for printing)</li> <li>embedded Javascript</li> <li>and a few more</li> </ul> <p><strong>FOSS software:</strong> <a href="http://www.ghostscript.com/releases/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Ghostscript</a> can try to size down your PDFs, mainy be re-sampling the pictures used and by removing older versions ("generations") of PDF objects which were replaced by newer ones:</p> <pre><code>gswin32c.exe ^ -o sized-down.pdf ^ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^ -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook ^ -dEmbedAllFonts=false ^ -c ".setpdfwrite <</AlwaysEmbed [ ]>>" ^ -f blown-up.pdf </code></pre> <p>You can add more parameters to above commandline to size down certain PDFs even more (f.e. by setting a lower max resolution, etc.) Here is an example to enforce a downsampling for color and grayscale images to 72dpi:</p> <pre><code>gswin32c.exe ^ -o sized-down.pdf ^ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^ -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook ^ -dEmbedAllFonts=false ^ -dColorImageDownsampleThreshold=1.0 ^ -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Average ^ -dColorImageResolution=72 ^ -dGrayImageDownsampleThreshold=1.0 ^ -dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Average ^ -dGrayImageResolution=72 ^ -c ".setpdfwrite <</AlwaysEmbed [ ]>>" ^ -f blown-up.pdf </code></pre> <p><strong>Commercial+closed source software:</strong> <a href="http://www.callassoftware.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">callas pdfToolbox4</a> is able to reduce file sizes even more by applying a custom profile to the PDF downsizing process (it can even un-embed fonts and ICC profiles).</p> <hr> <p><strong>Update 2:</strong> See also the following (new) question with the answer:</p> <ul> <li><strong><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/29657475/359307">How can I remove all images from a PDF?</a></strong></li> </ul> <p>It provides some sample PostScript code which completely removes all (raster) images from the PDF, leaving the rest of the page layout unchanged. This is useful in cases where you do not want the (raster) images, but only the text parts in order to reduce file size.</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload