Shrink Text in PDF using Ghostscript

Question

Is it possible to shrink the size of text for a PDF Document using Ghostscript? I've recently posted a question on how to shrink a two page pdf to one page, its close but I think If I can shrink the font a bit it would be perfect. I haven't been able to find anything online suggesting that you can shrink the size of the text... Is it capable of doing this?

Answer 1

Its possible, but it isn't easy and almost certainly won't help you.

You seem to be assuming that text in a PDF file works like it does in (eg) Word. If you change the size of the text then it all shuffles left a bit. In fact this is only partially the case. PDF files are intended to capture a particular layout, so the text description may include absolute positioning on the page, and white space addition/removal between words and glyphs. Changing the point size of the text wouldn't change the absolute positions, nor would it alter the white space which might lead to gaps, or to characters overlapping.

If you use -dPDFFitPage with a specific fixed media size, then you should be able to produce a resized PDF to fit the page you want.