PCbanter - View Single Post - Desktop freeware to SHRINK (aka optimize) PDFs

**ken**

In article , lid
says...

PS2PS(1) Ghostscript Tools PS2PS(1)

This isn't 'Ghostscript' its 'Ghostscript Tools'. Notice the man page
points out that these 'use' Ghostscript.

I don't think I said the contrary?

But you refer to ps2ps, and post the man page from 'Ghostscript tools
PS2PS'. Hence my points above. I believe (not unreasonably I feel ) that
the ps2ps you were referring to was the Ghostscript ps2ps.

Do *not* convert a PDF file to PostScript just so you can send the
resulting file through Ghostscript to get a PDF file. If you do that you
will very negatively impact the quality, as well as making the output
PDF file larger.

I don't think the quality should be impacted :-?

You *cannot* represent PDF transparency in PostScript, the PostScript
graphics model does not contain any real transparency (overprint and
masks do not count IMO and certainly do not approach the complexity of
the PDF transparency model.

You cannot presere ToUnicode CMaps through such a conversion and much
other metadata (hyperlinks for example) can only be preserved by use of
pdfmakrs. Some PDF constructs cannot be fully represented by pdfmarks.

First point; don't use the scripts, use Ghostscript directly.

For that, /I/ would have to know the exact concoction to mimic the
script while using Ghostscript directly, and I don't.

There is documentation replete with examples, and besides, its trivial:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o output.pdf input

Or

gs -sDEVICE=ps2write -o output.ps input

That is almost entirely what the scripts (in a bizarre and confusing
way) do.

Ken