Tonight, I need to compress my overly large pdf file created with LibreOffice in ubuntu with the export function. Here are the results:
a) directly creating a pdf: XXX.odt —> pdf on ubuntu (267k)
however,
b) indirectly creating a pdf: XXX.odt ---->.docx (ubuntu)---->.docx (mac)—>pdf (166K)
Why is the pdf smaller (the exact same file) when created from word rather than libre office?
Anyone have any ideas of why the difference?
It depends what the original file contains. Until recently (v4.4) LO did not include decent JPG compression.
V4.4 doesn’t seem to exist. I have 4.2 and 4.3 is available at the website.
Although it’s worth noting that at the time of this Q&A, v. 4.4 is still a “development” version. v. 4.3.4 is the stable (“fresh”) release.
This is not really an anwer, but rather a workaround:
The LO-developers set up some sensible default for PDF-export, I don’t know of a way to fiddle with those except in the Presenation Minimizer in Impress. But if you know what you want, you can use Ghostscript to toast your PDFs to your liking:
Install ghostscript, then open Terminal in the working folder, and issue:
gs -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dSAFER -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sstdout=%stderr -dGrayImageResolution=600 -dMonoImageResolution=1200 -dColorImageResolution=300 -sOutputFile=outputfile_gs.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f inputfile.pdf
This is just an example, which for example transformed an 8.4Mb PDF-presentation (with loads of PNGs) to a totally usable 2.4Mb PDF-file, w.o. visible loss of quality. Better experiment with the settings though.