I've spent hours trying to scan + shrink a multipage PDF document without losing readability. This is the first time I've ever needed to do this! (I had to scan each page as ".jpg" in order to email and open on another computer, so I could not scan to PDF directly, which I think is why each page was so large; lower DPIs made the text too blurry.)

I found this great tip on UbuntuGeek...but anyone can do this if GhostScript is installed:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-tip...#comment-88401

Many thanks to whoever posted this tip!

I tried it on a 139k text pdf and I got a 149k one! :-o.

I know this is an old thread but this thread is at the top of a google search when looking to reduce file size, the command is:

Some things that currently happen while running this command with the current apt-get install ghostscript version:

1: you need to specify a different output file name than the input file name, which is annoying, or else the outputted pdf will be blank / white.

2: if the pdf is not flattened (e.g. there's masked images), you'll get weird output, like missing backgrounds or missing images, what I ended up doing to fix this is using imagemagick's convert to jpg since jpg format doesn't have alpha channel (flat):

And then ran the ghostscript snippet above to reduce filesize, and so far that's been working for me well.

Hope this helps someone.

Welcome to LQ

Thank you for the update for posterity. Please mention your ghostscript version. Post the output of
as there's a couple of different ghostscripts.