[willus]

Originally Posted by PHC

You mean you just used the default settings? You have a LONG way to go before getting anything even approaching quality output. Take a look at this thread: pdftk compression option - Stack Overflow and ps2pdf: PostScript-to-PDF converter for details.

The link I posted lists explicit ghostscript command-line parameters which use the "pdfwrite" output device. I was skeptical like you when I first got the tip, but the conversion creates a perfect replica of the PDF source file except for the removal of the cropped-out text. I've used this conversion many times (in fact, it is integrated into k2pdfopt as an option because of the way it removes cropped-out text so nicely).

Originally Posted by PHC

Yes it is a very powerful and easy-to-use command line tool. You could 'extract pages' in Acrobat but it is not worth the bother if you need to do more than a few pages.

This program (cpdf) is awesome. It blows away the java-based equivalents on my Windows-based PC: 20x faster than pdfsam and over 100x faster than jpdftweak. And it easily handles PDFs with thousands of pages. No more java-based PDF tools for me. I hope to post a more complete benchmark at some point.