Convert searchable PDF to PDF without searching

Question

I have a searchable PDF and need to convert it to non-search.

I tried using Ghostscript and changing it to JPEG and then back to PDF, which does the trick, but the file size is too large and unacceptable.

I tried using Ghostscript to convert PDF to PS first and then to PDF, which also does the trick, but the quality is not good enough.

gswin32.exe -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pswrite -r1000 -sOutputFile=out.ps in.pdf gswin32.exe -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=596 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=834 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf out.ps 

Is there any way to give good quality pdf?

Alternatively, is there an easier way to convert searchable PDF to non-search?

Answer 1

You can use Ghostscript to achieve this. You need to follow 2 steps:

• Convert a PDF to a PostScript file in which all the fonts used are converted to outline shapes. The key here is the -dNOCACHE paragraph:

    gs -o somepdf.ps -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE = pswrite somepdf.pdf 

• Convert the PS back to PDF (and possibly delete the intermediate PS again):

    gs -o somepdf-with-outlines.pdf -sDEVICE = pdfwrite somepdf.ps
   rm somepdf.ps 

Please note that the resulting PDF is likely to be larger than the original. (And without additional command-line options, all images in the original PDF file will most likely also be converted according to the default Ghostscript settings, unless you add more command-line options to do otherwise. But the quality should be better than your own attempt to use ghostscript ...)

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Update

Apparently, from version 9.15 (will be released in September / October 2014) Ghostscript will support the new command line parameter :

  -dNoOutputFonts 

which will cause the output devices pdfwrite , ps2write and eps2write “smooth out” the glyphs into the “basic” marking operations (instead of writing the fonts in the output). "

This means that the above two steps can be avoided, and the desired result will be achieved with a single command:

  gs -o somepdf-with-outlines.pdf -dNoOutputFonts -sDEVICE=pdfwrite somepdf.pdf 

Caveats: I tested this with multiple input files using self-compiled Ghostscript based on current Git sources. In each case, it worked flawlessly.

Answer 2

Possible way to create a non-printable vector PDF file from a searchable PDF file

• pdf package on your pages

  pdftk file.pdf burst

• convert any single page to svg using

  pdftocairo

  • http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

contained in poppler utils

 for f in *.pdf; do pdftocairo -svg $f; done 

3. delete ALL pdf in the folder

4. then the batikrasterizer

• http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/tools/rasterizer.html

convert ALL svg to pdf (this time received pdf files will be saved in vector format, but cannot be searched)

 java -jar ./batik-rasterizer.jar -m application/pdf *.svg 

final step : merge all the resulting single-page pd into a single multi-page PDF file

 pdftk *.pdf cat output out.pdf 

Answer 3

I think converting to an image such as jpg is the way, maybe it is worth converting the image am, optimizing / reducing the size of the images, and then creating a PDF with them?