I use the Notability app for note taking in my iPad. I need to export one of my notes and upload it to a web site with file size restrictions (unfortunately I don't know the maximum size, but I have reason to believe it is 2 MB).
A 12-page-long note, consisting only of written text/mathematics and a single grayscale imported figure in one of the pages is taking up 10+ MB, which is frankly outrageous. Also, I'm pretty sure taking out the figure would make little difference; seems like the developers never paid attention to exported file sizes.
How can I reduce this to fit into my 2 MB budget?
Ideally I'd like to flip a switch inside Notability itself which reduced the export file size, but I don't think anything like that exists.
Otherwise, I'm looking for free tools which would help me reduce the file size. EDIT: online tools are not a possibility, as I can't run the risk of my file being stored and later distributed somehow.
I've already tried exporting a PDF from Preview.app with the "Reduce File Size" filter, which didn't make a difference.
Ghostscript fared a little better: gs -o out.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET in.pdf
reduced the file size to 7 MB, but it's not enough for me.
ImageMagick's convert
tool produced output that could be barely classified as readable, even at an alleged 600 DPI.
I also tried exporting JPEGs from Notability and concatenating them with Preview.app, which produced a 4 MB file size, still unsuitable for me (and also, I lose vector rendering, searching, etc. that way, which if possible I'd like to retain).
My best result until now was running this 4 MB file through gs -o out.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET in.pdf
(note ebook
instead of printer
). It is readable, although visibly compressed, and takes up 1.3 MB. Lacking any other options, this is the file I'm going to submit, but I'm hopeful there's a better solution.
Any other suggestions?