How to shrink PDFs

Sometimes a PDF document you’ve created is several megabytes in size due to high resolution images. This may cause problems when you want to send this PDF via email if the attachement’s size is limited by your email provider. There is a way you can reduce the file size of an existing PDF without having to render it again with low resolution images.

How to fix the MIME-Type of PDF attachments in Thunderbird E-Mails

Recent versions of Mozilla Thunderbird set a wrong MIME-Type for PDF-files that are attached to an E-Mail. Thunderbird sets the MIME-Type to text/html instead of pdf/application. As a result the mail client of the receiver tries to display the PDF-file as plaintext and this leads most of the times to a system lock or crash of the mail client. I really don’t know why Mozilla did this, but I’m sure that they had their reasons, because the problem is very obvious and also easy to fix:

How to merge PDF files

You can use the Linux command-line too pdftk to merge several PDF files into one.

Example:
You have two PDF file a.pdf and b.pdf and want to merge these two files into one file named c.pdf.

pdftk a.pdf b.pdf cat output c.pdf

Another way to do this, is to use handles:

pdftk A=a.pdf B=b.pdf cat A B output c.pdf

Last update: 14.06.2015