Optimising your pdf file – latex dvips ps2pdf

For those wanting to distribute latex documents in pdf file format, it is possible to leave all optimisation of the file to the last step.

latex command generates dvi file.

dvips command generates ps file

ps2pdf command generates pdf file.

ps2pdf has a lot of possible options for file optimisation. The option -dPDFSETTINGS=
provides several sets of defaults to generate output similar to the acrobat distiller program in windows and mac (of course in linux you also have flexibility to specify every other option too if you wanted).

For example;

ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf generates big file

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen file.ps file_screenoptimised.pdf generates small file suitable for reading on computer screen only

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook file.ps file_ebookoptimised.pdf generates slightly larger file with higher resolution graphics suitable for ebook readers

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