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I'm looking for a tool for macOS (Windows and Linux would also be nice) that will compress PDFs with a lossless or near-lossless methodology.

There is an interesting discussion for ImageOptim PDF compression that seems to be still hanging out in limbo.

It would be ideal if there were an application that would choose between PNG or JPEG2000 and re-encode the images as such based on the best savings + the least difference (a binary image differ).

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If you open your file in Preview you will get several options. Select export from under the File menu and you can save the PDF file as jpeg, jpeg2000, png, tiff. You can also resave it as a PDF with an option to reduce size.

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  • This is true, however when I've tried this in the past I never seemed to have real good success. It's been years since I've trusted or even tried Preview for this purpose, so perhaps I need to give it another shot to see how it goes...
    – ylluminate
    Oct 4, 2019 at 4:06
  • So I was under the impression that you were saying that you could re-save the PDF with JPEG2000 image compression for all images within the PDF while retaining OCR and all metadata, etc. Unfortunately I guess you were saying to save a PDF as JPEG2000 output and then reimport that and save as a PDF... Hrm.
    – ylluminate
    Oct 4, 2019 at 4:17
  • i was trying to answer your title question: I'm looking for a tool for macOS (Windows and Linux would also be nice) that will compress PDFs with a lossless or near-lossless methodology.
    – Natsfan
    Oct 4, 2019 at 4:39
  • i mentioned that you can resave a PDF as a new compressed PDF.
    – Natsfan
    Oct 4, 2019 at 4:40
  • Thanks for taking a stab, yes I understand. Unfortunately given this method, as I noted, you lose the text of the document and only retain images in an image only PDF from my test... By definition this is lossy in that it loses the textual data.
    – ylluminate
    Oct 4, 2019 at 16:02

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