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Sometimes an important form has crazy low upload limits. Then you need to shrink your PDF file.
Luckily there is a tool called Ghostscript (Linux package: commonly called ghostscript, Windows download). Open your terminal or command prompt navigate to your directory and type the following command:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=OUTPUT.pdf INPUT.pdf
Then you need to set three or four parameters:
- Windows users may need to replace gs by gswin32, gswin64 or even the whole path "C:\Program Files\gs9.23\bin\gswin64.exe"
- PDFSETTINGS has multiple levels/profiles (from low to high quality)
This preference sets the desired quality or (the other way around) compression rate!- /screen (tiny)
- /ebook (readable)
- /prepress (printable)
- /printer
- /default
- OUTPUT.pdf is the path to your output file and
- INPUT.pdf to your input file
Run the command - done! The results are great. I could compress my PDFs vom 4 MB to 200 KB which matched the limit so the upload was successful.
There also are scripts as a shortcut for this long command.
Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/256449
