hi - go easy on me, i'm new to UNIX...

i need to resample huge pdf files and make them smaller.

distiller won't resize existing pdf files.

i thought i could print the pdf to a postscript file and then resample that. would that work?

if so, how?

is this the best way forward or should i purchase some specific products to achieve this?

It may work.

IMO the ghostscript PDF writer writes smaller files compared with Adobe Distiller. I once prepared an MS Word document of about 20MB in size at work which even failed to distill with Adobe Distiller (the W2K simply hanged) after many hours of operation. Then I transferred it back home and used the gsview frontend to generate a PDF successfully (and rather quickly) of about 7MB via a several- hundred MB postscript file generated by a postscript printer driver on Windows, though precision loss can be seen at really small places. Probably you may try likewise and see if it gives you a similar conclusion.

This method generally creates smaller PDF compared with OpenOffice.org one-click PDF writer too.