Densify For Linux

Ghostscript is a phenomenal piece of software that's been under active development for over 20 years. That alone should make it quite clear just how important Ghostscript is.

Thanks to its versatile feature set, and the fact that it can be deployed on pretty much any platform out there, it's no wonder that Ghostscript is at the heart of many PDF conversion/management apps.

Densify is one such application. It's a minimalist GTK+ GUI app (that uses Ghostscript) written in Python and has one job - to help users compress PDF files with just a few mouse clicks.

The way Densify works is pretty similar to all other apps of this sort: you load the PDF file, select a few options, and press the "Compress Now!" button at the bottomm, and that's pretty much it.

There are various types of compressions available: screen, ebook, printer, prepress, and default. Also, please note that if an output name is not specified, the "compressed.pdf" moniker will be used instead.

There are a couple of "issues" you need to be aware of. This is an app that hasn't been properly maintained for years. For staters, for some reason, the icon don't want to be displayed in this app. The error handling in this app is also a bit weird.

In short, it's designed to have a sort of fail-safe so that users don't encounter any potentially harmful executions of Ghostscript.

Densify is not exactly an impressive application and the fact that it isn't actively maintained is somewhat disconcerting. Be that as it may, I was actually surprised of how well it works, despite it sometimes showing faulty results (i.e. the compressed file is bigger in size than the original - this is obviously not the case).