You can use Ghostscript command line tool for compressing a PDF file. Most Linux distributions include the open source version of Ghostscript already. However, you can still try to install it just to make sure.
On Debian/Ubuntu based distributions, use the following command to install Ghostscript:
sudo apt install ghostscript
MacOS with Brew:
brew install ghostscript
Now that you have made sure that Ghostscript is installed, you can use the following command to reduce the size of your PDF file:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=compressed_PDF_file.pdf input_PDF_file.pdf
In the above command, you should add the correct path of the input and out PDF file.
The command looks scary and confusing. I advise copying and pasting most of it. What you need to know is the dPDFSETTINGS parameter. This is what determines the compression level and thus the quality of your compressed PDF file.
| dPDFSETTINGS | Description |
|---|---|
| /prepress (default) | Higher quality output (300 dpi) but bigger size |
| /ebook | Medium quality output (150 dpi) with moderate output file size |
| /screen | Lower quality output (72 dpi) but smallest possible output file size |