Reduce the file size of a PDF (except CLI)

Question

Currently, when I need to reduce the size of a PDF file I use ghostscript in a CLI command like this (with some variances when I'm working with images):

$ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=new.pdf old.pdf 

This command works like a charm, but I'd like to know if exists any GUI tool for the same purpose that works on Ubuntu.

Some cool requirements (not mandatory):

• Select specific pages (with images, for example) to ignore in the reduce. The intention is to prevent a reduction in image resolution when this can make them unreadable;
• Specify a desired range for the file size;
• Free and Open Source is a plus;

Answer 1

You can use ScanTailor, or XnViewMP or both.

• free software
• cross-platform
• they can only work with TIFF images so you'll have to find a way to convert PDF to TIFF (gs can do that too, but you're getting back to CLI) and then again merge TIFFs into PDF
• XnViewMP has better batch automation than ScanTailor

You can't specify a desired output size range, but if you apply compression and color settings correctly you'll get a relatively small size with good quality. I wrote about this on my website.