Description
An 80 MB scan you need to email, forty PDFs to merge, a journal that wants PDF/A, an old printer that only speaks PostScript. Online tools exist for all of it, but uploading company contracts to somebody else server is a decision you would rather not make.
Ghostscript keeps all of it local. It is the veteran engine in the PostScript and PDF world, and plenty of the viewers, print drivers and converters you already use call into it underneath. One command shrinks a PDF to a fraction of its size, with image resampling under your control; merging, splitting, encrypting and rasterising to PNG, JPEG or TIFF are each one command too, and they script cleanly across hundreds of files.
PDF compression: Resamples embedded images and subsets fonts, with screen, ebook and print presets. Scans shrink the most.
Format conversion: Between PDF, PostScript and EPS, or rasterised to PNG, JPEG, TIFF and BMP at a resolution you choose.
Merge and split: Combine documents or extract page ranges in a single command, no GUI involved.
Print pipeline backend: Converts PostScript into what printers actually understand; CUPS and many print stacks rely on it.
Command line everywhere: Official builds for Windows, macOS and Linux, which makes batch scripting the natural way to use it.
Ghostscript keeps all of it local. It is the veteran engine in the PostScript and PDF world, and plenty of the viewers, print drivers and converters you already use call into it underneath. One command shrinks a PDF to a fraction of its size, with image resampling under your control; merging, splitting, encrypting and rasterising to PNG, JPEG or TIFF are each one command too, and they script cleanly across hundreds of files.
Features
PDF compression: Resamples embedded images and subsets fonts, with screen, ebook and print presets. Scans shrink the most.
Format conversion: Between PDF, PostScript and EPS, or rasterised to PNG, JPEG, TIFF and BMP at a resolution you choose.
Merge and split: Combine documents or extract page ranges in a single command, no GUI involved.
Print pipeline backend: Converts PostScript into what printers actually understand; CUPS and many print stacks rely on it.
Command line everywhere: Official builds for Windows, macOS and Linux, which makes batch scripting the natural way to use it.
