You know that (Quartz? ColorSync?) filter, for instance when you Save As in Preview, that lets you "reduce file size"? I'd really love to be able to do that in Linux or Windows, rather than taking all my PDFs home to shrink them. Does anyone know how to do this?
Specifically, the filter seems to be doing the following:
1. reducing the resolution of embedded images to close-to-screen-density, i.e. around 120ppi (good for web, bad for print),
2. throwing away unnecessary data in the PDF (invisible items, items completely hidden behind other items), and
3. doing all this while leaving the vector data (text, shapes, etc.) untouched (not rasterized).
I've figured out how to change the "density" of a PDF using ImageMagick, but that destroys the vector data. Other utilities that deal with "PDF compression" simply use the PDF format's built-in data compression, which doesn't help all that much.
In case it matters, I specifically need to reduce the size of the mammoth PDFs output by Inkscape. Even just re-saving the PDF with Preview can take a 50MB file down to around 5MB or less. Using "reduce file size" can then get that down to less than 1MB. Clearly Inkscape's PDF output is not optimal; if anyone knows a better way of doing this please let me know.
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