Not everyone has an Adobe Acrobat Professional license, much less one has necessarily an operating system running on the Acrobat. So I was looking for a way to optimize PDF files with open source software to shrink so the file size of images by downsampling and compression.
And I also found it. With the combination xpdf and ghostscript to go about it.

I have put together a small script for Windows where you have to adjust only the paths:

set xpdf="X:\Path\to\xpdf"
set ghostscript="X:\Path\to\ghostscript\bin"
set suffix="_opt.pdf"
%xpdf%\pdftops.exe -paper match -level3 hsq.pdf tmp.ps
%ghostscript%\gswin32c.exe -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dColorConversionStrategy=/LeaveColorUnchanged -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=hsq.pdf%suffix% tmp.ps
del tmp.ps


The whole course is on Linux / Mac if installed xpdf and ghostscript:

suffix="_opt.pdf"
pdftops -paper match -level3 hsq.pdf tmp.ps
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dColorConversionStrategy=/LeaveColorUnchanged -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=hsq.pdf$suffix tmp.ps
rm tmp.ps

The more current, the respective versions the better the result looks like. If at least my experience.

Last night, I think again that it can not really be that hard for the freshmen newspaper, which always makes the student council for the new Erstis the Department, instead of using the old layout unieigene the corporate design. Is, after all, a LaTeX package for it.

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