Debian / Ubuntu / Pop!_OS:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pypdf python3-reportlab \
                 python3-pikepdf python3-pil poppler-utils fonts-dejavu-core

Then put the scripts on your PATH, for example:

install -m 0755 bin/uspto-pdf bin/pdf-shrink bin/img-shrink ~/.local/bin/

With pip instead of apt: pip install --user pypdf reportlab pikepdf pillow. img-shrink also needs pip install --user mozjpeg-lossless-optimization pyoxipng.

Jbig2enc (needed by pdf-shrink)

pdf-shrink calls the jbig2 encoder from jbig2enc (Apache-2.0). It is not bundled here.

• Some distributions package it (jbig2enc on Debian, Fedora and others; check apt search jbig2enc).
• Otherwise build it from source:

bash sudo apt install build-essential autoconf automake libtool libleptonica-dev git clone https://github.com/agl/jbig2enc && cd jbig2enc ./autogen.sh && ./configure --prefix="$HOME/.local" && make && make install

Use a current checkout: older release tarballs do not build against Leptonica 1.83 and later, whose structures became opaque.

pdf-shrink looks for the encoder in this order: --jbig2 PATH, the PDF_SHRINK_JBIG2 environment variable, a jbig2/jbig2enc file next to the script, then jbig2 on PATH.

uspto-pdf

Patent Center accepts only Letter (8.5 x 11 in) or A4 pages. Drawings exported from presentation software come out at slide size (10 x 7.5 in), CAD and diagram tools export at drawing size, and scanners often produce Legal. All of those are rejected.

uspto-pdf places each page, upright and scaled, on a fresh portrait sheet inside the 37 CFR 1.84(g) margins (top 1 in, left 1 in, right 5/8 in, bottom 3/8 in). It honours /Rotate and CropBox, flattens away sticky-note annotations (which Patent Center renders inconsistently), and warns about fonts that are not embedded.

uspto-pdf --check figures.pdf                       # report only; exit 2 if non-compliant
uspto-pdf figures.pdf                               # writes figures-uspto.pdf
uspto-pdf --header "Replacement Sheet" figures.pdf  # amended drawings, 37 CFR 1.121(d)
uspto-pdf --size a4 -o out.pdf figures.pdf
uspto-pdf --in-place drawings/*.pdf                 # overwrite, keeping NAME.pdf.bak

Options: --valign top|center, --max-scale X (default 1.0, never enlarge), --keep-annots, --font FAMILY|PATH.ttf (header font, default DejaVu Sans), --suffix, --no-backup.

Notes:

• --header stamps every page unconditionally. Do not run it twice on the same file or the header is printed twice.
• The header must use an embeddable TrueType font. If none is found the tool falls back to Helvetica and warns, because Patent Center flags non-embedded fonts. PDFs produced by other software can carry the same problem; one common fix is Ghostscript: gs -o out.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress in.pdf.
• Filled AcroForm fields can disappear when pages are rebuilt. Flatten filled forms first (for example by printing to PDF) and check the result.

pdf-shrink

Patent documents, file wrappers and many journal scans are 300 dpi 1-bit page images compressed with CCITT Group 4. JBIG2 generic-region coding stores the same pixels in roughly half the space.

pdf-shrink scan.pdf                                  # writes scan.shrunk.pdf
pdf-shrink -r prior-art/ --output-dir prior-art-small/
pdf-shrink -r prior-art/ --dry-run --report measure.csv
pdf-shrink -r prior-art/ --limit 50 --dry-run        # random sample, projected savings
pdf-shrink -r prior-art/ --in-place --backup-dir ~/pdf-originals --jobs 4

Safety properties:

• Generic-region coding only. JBIG2 symbol ("text") mode can substitute look-alike glyphs, the cause of the well-known scanner digit-swap bug. It is never used, since these are often evidentiary documents.
• Render verification. The input and the candidate are rendered page by page with pdftoppm at 300 dpi (--verify-dpi) and compared byte for byte. Page counts must match. Any difference is reported as FAIL and the result is discarded. Pages are rendered one at a time, so temporary disk use stays small even for large-format sheets.
• Only smaller results are kept. Files without CCITT images are skipped.
• Originals are kept. The default writes a new file. --in-place refuses to run without --backup-dir DIR or an explicit --no-backup, and refuses a backup directory that is inside the input tree or inside a cloud-synced folder (Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud and similar).
• Image dictionary flags such as /Interpolate are preserved, and /Decode arrays are handled so images are not inverted twice. Both were real bugs that the render check caught during development.

Other options: --jobs N, --report CSV with --resume, --max-page-mp N to skip huge pages, --limit N [--seed S | --first]. --verify-scale N is faster but weaker (it cannot see a dropped /Interpolate); leave it off unless you accept that.

Large runs are CPU-heavy. Consider nice -n 19 and a modest --jobs.

img-shrink

img-shrink -r figures/ --output-dir figures-small/
img-shrink -r figures/ --in-place --backup-dir ~/img-originals

JPEGs are optimized losslessly (entropy coding only, DCT coefficients untouched) and PNGs are re-deflated. A result is kept only if the decoded pixels are identical and the file is smaller.

Tests

The tests generate synthetic PDFs (a slide-sized page, a Legal page, a rotated page with an annotation, and 1-bit scan-like pages stored as CCITT G4). No real documents are involved.

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v

Tests whose dependencies are missing (for example jbig2enc) are skipped. Point PDF_SHRINK_JBIG2 at an encoder binary to run the pdf-shrink tests.