Re: making a pdf file smaller the debian way....

["John A. Sullivan III" <jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com>]

On Sun, 2011-01-02 at 03:05 +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote:
<snip>
> So I gave up with Acrobat and used the ghostscript command gs
> -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen
> -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf  which
> worked really well and made a smaller pdf file for me.
<snip>

This looked useful to some of our clients who use Windows primarily for
Acrobat and principally to reduce PDF file sizes.  So we created a KDE
service menu so that they could simply right click on a PDF file, go to
Actions, and choose Reduce PDF File(s).  I don't recall if Acrobat calls
this Reduce or Optimize.  In case it may be of use to anyone else,
here's how we did it:

We wrapped the command in a script to create user dialogs, handle spaces
in file names, etc., named reducepdf:
#!/bin/bash
OFILE=""
OK=true
FILES="\"$(echo "${1}" | sed 's/ \//\" \"\//g')\""
DIR="$(echo ${FILES} | sed 's/\"\([^\"]*\)\".*/\1/')"
DIR="${DIR%/*}/"
EXT=""
while ${OK}
do
	OFILE="$(kdialog --title "Enter New Reduced PDF File Name"
--getsavefilename ${DIR})"
	if [ $? -ne 0 ];then
		exit 4
	fi
	EXT="${OFILE: -4:4}"
	if [ "${EXT}" != ".pdf" -a "${EXT}" != ".PDF" ];then
		OFILE="${OFILE}.pdf"
	fi
	if [ -f "${OFILE}" ];then
		kdialog --title "Reduce PDF File" --warningyesno "The file ${OFILE}
already exists.\nShall I overwrite it?"
		if [ $? -ne 0 ];then
			continue
		fi
	fi
	OK=false
done
kdialog --title "Reduce PDF File" --msgbox "PDF reduction can take
several minutes.\nPlease wait until you see the Reduction Completed
message\nbefore opening the new, reduced file.\nThe file may appear in
your file manager before it is ready\nbut you will receive a file
damaged error message\nif you open it too soon." &
eval gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=\"${OFILE}\" ${FILES}
kdialog --title "Reduce PDF File" --msgbox "PDF Reduction Completed for:
\n${OFILE}"


We created the service menu in
<KDEDIR>/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/39748-reducepdf.desktop

[Desktop Action Reduce_PDF]
Exec=<path to>/reducepdf "%F"
Icon=acroread
Name=Reduce PDF file(s)

[Desktop Entry]
Actions=Reduce_PDF
Encoding=UTF-8
ServiceTypes=application/pdf,application/vnd.adobe.pdf

As you can tell from the messages, we hit a bit of a problem.
Ghostscript creates the new file and then takes a while to finish
writing to it.  Unfortunately, Konqueror displays the file immediately
and, if the user clicks on it while the file is yet incomplete, it
generates a corrupted file error message.  Does anyone know how to
change the behavior of gs, Konqueror, KDE, dcop, or anything else to
ensure the file icon does not appear until the reduction is complete?
Thanks - John