presse

A fast command-line tool for PDF compression, written in Rust.

Compress PDF files naturally and easily with this ready-to-use command line tool. You don't want to send your sensitive documents online? Ghostscript is too obscure to use? Presse is the answer! Its usage is very intuitive. Images are decoded, compressed and then re-encoded without intermediate steps, making it fast and reliable. Future features are on the roadmap (maybe from a contributor like you?) for PDF merging, splitting and extraction!

Features

Image recompression — re-encodes images at a target quality, skipping CMYK images
Structural compression — object stream packing, xref stream compression, unused object removal
Batch processing — compress multiple files in one command via shell wildcards
Smart output paths — sensible defaults, explicit naming, or output to a directory

Installation

cargo install presse

Usage

# Single file — outputs document_compressed.pdf alongside the original
presse document.pdf

# Custom output name
presse document.pdf -o small.pdf

# Output to a directory
presse document.pdf -o compressed/

# Batch — multiple files into a directory
presse *.pdf -o compressed/

# Set JPEG quality (0–100, default 80)
presse document.pdf --quality 60

# Suppress output
presse document.pdf --verbose false

Options

Flag	Default	Description
`-o, --output`	`<input>_compressed.pdf`	Output file or directory
`-q, --quality`	`80`	Image recompression quality (0–100)
`-v, --verbose`	`true`	Print size comparison after each file

Limitations

CMYK images are not compressed (not currently handled by image crate)

Dependencies

lopdf — PDF parsing and manipulation
clap — CLI argument parsing
indicatif — Progress bars
image — JPEG decoding and encoding

Contributions

We are happy to welcome contributions! The next step we have in mind is to migrate to subcommands to implement document merging or splitting in a single CLI! Pull requests are welcome.

License

GPL-3.0

presse 0.1.1