Compressing PDFs with a Simple CLI Command

Have you ever needed to compress a PDF but didn’t want to use bulky software or online tools? Today, I learned about a neat way to do it using Ghostscript, a powerful command-line tool.

Why Use This?

Here’s the command in action:

bash 
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compresspdf() {
	gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/${3:-"screen"} -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sOutputFile="$2" "$1"
}

This little shell function, named compresspdf, takes three arguments:

How It Works

The function uses Ghostscript (gs), a versatile tool for processing PDFs and PostScript files, with the following options:

Create a bash script file compresspdf.sh with bellow content

bash 
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#!/bin/bash

# Usage: compresspdf [input file] [output file] [screen*|ebook|printer|prepress]

# Check that the required arguments are provided
if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
    echo "Usage: compresspdf [input file] [output file] [screen*|ebook|printer|prepress]"
    exit 1
fi

compresspdf() {
    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/${3:-"ebook"} -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sOutputFile="$2" "$1"
}

compresspdf "$1" "$2" "$3"

Make it executable

bash 
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 chmod +x ./compresspdf.sh

Usage

Here’s how to use the function:

Run it with the required arguments:

bash 
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./compresspdf.sh input.pdf output.pdf [compression_level]

For example:

bash 
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./compresspdf.sh ./input.pdf ./output.pdf ebook

If you don’t specify a compression level, it defaults to screen, which is optimized for smaller file sizes.

This function is a handy addition to any developer’s toolkit, saving time and effort while maintaining full control over PDF compression.

Do you use a similar tool or script for handling PDFs? Let me know in the comments!