Comment 16 for bug 75384

May I add my own contribution - I am running on Maverick, x86_64; I just scanned a single sheet, with few numbers typed, some of them in color - a pretty raw and almost empty document; I scanned it in 150dpi, full color, the result was a 2.8 MB pdf file; then I applied a trick I discovered by chance a few days ago, as I needed to merge scanned pdfs; so today I used it in order to shrink my single-page pdf :

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

result : out.pdf size is 187 KB ! and note that this is not a conversion : this is used to MERGE pdfs.

Additionally, when opening the pdf produced by xsane with evince from a terminal, I get 2399 lines such as :

Error (358497): Illegal character <d9> in hex string
Error (358498): Illegal character <16> in hex string
Error (358499): Illegal character <d1> in hex string
Error (358500): Illegal character <9f> in hex string
Error (358501): Illegal character <5b> in hex string
Error (358502): Illegal character <fe> in hex string

when I open the one generated by gs, 0 (zero) error is generated - btw, it has been years that xsane pdfs yield such errors when opened by evince - but I guess that very few people open them from a terminal ...