I made ​​a build of the poppler-utils-0.15 on Windows. I needed a newer version of pdftops, the one from the xpdf binaries which to old ...

The build works on my machine, I hope it does on others as well. Feel free to try it.

Not everyone has an Adobe Acrobat Professional license and still less one has necessarily an operating system running on the Acrobat. That's why I've been looking for a way to optimize PDFs with Open Source software, so to reduce the file size by downsampling and compression of images.
And I'm found it. With the combination xpdf and ghostscript can be accomplished that.

I assembled 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 also under 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 recent are the respective versions the better the result looks like. At least my experience.

Last night, I think again that it can not really be that hard for Erstsemesterzeitung which always makes the student representatives for the new Erstis the department, instead of using the old layout unieigene the corporate design. Are, after all, a LaTeX package for it.

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