Create a low resolution pdf of a LaTeX paper

Alec Jacobson

April 21, 2016

weblog/

Here're the steps I use to create a low resolution version of a pdf created by LaTeX.

The simple thing to do is to follow the steps to create a camera ready (high res) pdf but replace the JPG settings to downsample the images and perhaps reduce the quality.

If you have a lot of raster images, this will work OK.

However, if you have a lot of vector graphics images or just a lot of images, this will not truly bring down the size of the final pdf.

For this I make sure that all of my \includegraphics commands in LaTeX are of the form:

\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{\figs/figure-file-name}

Notice three things:

1. the width is explicitly specified,
2. the figure directory is a command/macro \figs, and
3. the filename does not have an extension (figure-file-name instead of figure-file-name.pdf)

Then at the beginning of my file I have defined \figs. For the normal high resolution pdf I use:

\newcommand{\figs}{}
\def\figs/{figs/}

When I switch to low resolution I use

\newcommand{\figs}{}
%\def\figs/{figs/}
\def\figs/{figs/low-res/}

And before compiling I run the commands:

mkdir -p figs/low-res/
mogrify -colorspace RGB -resize 400x -background white -alpha remove -quality 100 -format jpg -path figs/low-res/ figs/*.{pdf,png}[0]

There are a couple import flags here to ensure that the background is white and only a single output is created for pdfs with accidentally multiple art-boards/pages.