Shell script for compressing PDF files on Ubuntu

I have previously written about a shell script) for compressing PDF files in Ubuntu. Here are some variants of the script.

Low, mid, and high resolution

Low resolution for screen:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

I prefer the “ebook” mode, which has slightly higher resolution:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

And then there is the high resolution for printing:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

Since I don’t need to print things very often, I generally find the “ebook” mode to be a good balance between size and quality.

Batch scripting

Here are some scripts for batch processing multiple files. One for the “ebook” mode:

for i in *.pdf; do name=`echo $i | cut -d'.' -f1`; gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="${name}_ebook.pdf" "$i"; done

And one for printing:

for i in *.pdf; do name=`echo $i | cut -d'.' -f1`; gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="${name}_printer.pdf" "$i"; done

The commands are tricky to remember, but easy to copy into a terminal.