Unfortunately, this can yield all the bugs I’ve discussed as side-effects. Gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERIMAGE -dFILTERVECTOR -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile= And the compression can obscure pages which were rasterized in the original. Unfortunately, this doesn’t remove background images, and can leave a gray box around other images, adding to the problem. Gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=

Gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile= So to make the pdf 1.4-compatible without compression, you can run:

Fortunately, my brother coded an automator adaptation of one of the required scripts, and I’ve modified it for the others. I have found a workable solution for most scanned pdfs, but there has to be a better way for pdf-born-pdfs.įor pdf-born-pdfs, I tend to use a combination of ghostscript and cpdf. I have a particularly bad migraine, so I don’t want to elaborate my solutions just yet. Is it so much to want to be able to take a pdf file, drop it on an app, and get a readable pdf file? I can correct this in cpdf, but it’s one more step. They end up with white text on a white background. They lose scale and only part of the original page shows on the new page. They lose text from other pages, because of encoding errors. They lose text from certain pages, because it was raster text rather than text text. I’ve tried various ways to repair pdfs but often run into other problems afterwards: They have text layers, but these are gibberish in another text encoding from the actual text, or these are full of ligatures, or both. Which may look great on the intended device, but obscure the text on other devices. Which is especially frustrating when it’s a scanned book and every single page is a jpeg2000 image.

But my Mac takes much more time to try to go through, and my Kindle skips. Which my Mac goes right through, but the Kindle can’t load. Some of the frustrating failure modes I’ve encountered before trying to repair pdfs: Really, pdfs shouldn’t be the standard that they are.

Automator mac epub to txt