Gems of February 25"

Another month went by. Here are my gems of the month.

Technology

Compress PDFs with Ghostscript

Compressing PDFs isn’t a simple task, because it’s a complex format with different medias embedded. Ghostscript is a powerful tool to manipulate PDFs.

Via the PDFSETTINGS parameter, you can set the compression level. This is documented here.

Here is an example to compress a input.pdf to output.pdf:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

According to this post the options are:

• -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen lower quality, smaller size. (72 dpi)
• -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook for better quality, but slightly larger pdfs. (150 dpi)
• -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress output similar to Acrobat Distiller “Prepress Optimized” setting (300 dpi)
• -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller “Print Optimized” setting (300 dpi)
• -dPDFSETTINGS=/default selects output intended to be useful across a wide variety of uses, possibly at the expense of a larger output file

VSCode on remote RedHat server causes issues

When connecting to a remote server, VS Code tries to index the file system. Something goes wrong with that on RedHat devices, because it endlessly loops through some commonly found symlinks.

To disable this switch the following setting off:

search.followSymlinks