imagemagick - a fast way to compress PDF files

Sometimes its useful to have a quick way to compress PDF files. I have found imagemagick contains a great command line tool 'convert'.

Background on imagemagick

• Number of CLI tools to create and edit bitmap images 
• Can read, convert and write images in many formats
• Supports common formats e.g. PDF, JPEG, GIF and PNG

Convert CLI tool

• Convert's between image formats 
• Blur images
• Crop images
• Draw on images
• Flip images
• Also can resize an image among many other tasks

Installation

• Install on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

$ sudo apt-get -y install imagemagick

Example

• The following will compress the input.pds to output.pdf

$ convert -compress jpeg -density 100 input.pdf output.pdf

Further Information

• Imagemagick project page
• Command line

$ man convert