Ghostscript

• PDF Conversion
  • Merge PDF Files
  • Split PDF Files
  • Strip Down Size/Quality

Some ghostscript snippets

PDF Conversion

Merge PDF Files

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE="merged_file.pdf" -dBATCH file1.pdf file2.pdf ... fileN.pdf

Split PDF Files

yes | gs -dBATCH -sOutputFile="output.pdf" -dFirstPage=100 -dLastPage=105 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite "INPUT.pdf" >& /dev/null

Alternative ‘convert‘
Using convert it is easier to extract multiple page ranges from the PDF. But it had a really bad output quality the at least last time I tried it out.

convert file1.pdf[0] file2.pdf[0-1,3] output.pdf

Strip Down Size/Quality

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

Where -dPDFSETTINGS can be one of

-dPDFSETTINGS=/screen   --> low quality
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook    --> medium quality
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress --> full quality