Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Jun 18, 2026

How to compress a pdf file on mac without losing quality

Hello everyone, I have a PDF file on my Mac that is too large to upload and share. The document contains a mix of text, images, and a few graphics, so I would like to shrink the PDF file size while ...

Audret

Iron Contributor

Jun 18, 2026

How to compress a PDF file on mac? If you're comfortable with the Terminal, Ghost script is a powerful, open-source command-line tool that offers much more control over the compression process than Preview.

How to compress a PDF file on mac: You use specific commands with different presets (/screen, /ebook, /printer) that control the output quality and file size. The /screen preset creates the smallest files, while /ebook offers a good balance.

How to install: You can install it on Mac using the Homebrew package manager with a simple command:

brew install ghost script

A sample command:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompati bilityLevel=1.4 - dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE - dQUIET -dBATCH - sOutputFile=optimized, pdf original,pdf

This method is entirely free and gives you precise control but requires a bit of a learning curve.