Compress a .pdf in macOS with Preview.app
• 83 words • 1 min • updated
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All hail to Apple Documentation.
The instructions are very simple:
- open the
.pdffile in Preview.app - export it (
File > Export) - in “quartz filter”, select the “reduce file size” option
- save
I observed a scanned document with ~3.3MiB of file size be compressed to ~350KiB. Not bad! And although not very customizable, it’s very user-friendly and easy to remember.
The alternative would have been to use GhostScript (gs). For example, ChatGPT
suggests:
shell
% gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf