PDF reduce file size

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi Folks-

We version a lot of PDFs by adding pages and making other changes, then saving. This bloats the file size and eventually a resave is required to reduce the size. I would like to incorporate a ‘resave’ into our file staging workflow.

I can do this via Applescript and Acrobat, but it would be more elegant w/o a physical interface, ie line command. I tried Colorsync, which is unix-scriptable. However, this strips out all of our form fields and javascript.

Does anyone know another stable line-command solution to the file size issue that works in 10.4 and 10.5?

thanks!

Ralph

#2

Hi Ralph,

Once you told me that applying ColorSync/Quartz filters to PDF documents will delete their form fields, I have also tried Ghostscript to reduce the file size with the following command, but unfortunately without luck.

So I guess only Acrobat can reduce the file size and preserve the AcroForms…


set command to "/usr/local/bin/gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=/Users/martin/Desktop/newFile.pdf /Users/martin/Desktop/oldFile.pdf"
set output to do shell script command