One of the problems we often meet when submitting papers is that the size of our pdf paper is beyond the space limit. For graphics and vision conferences, it is very common for us to generate a ~50 MB pdf while the size limit for the paper and supplemental materials together is about 20MB. That is necessary for the conference to guarantee its submission site is still functionable at the last seconds before the deadline.

To reduce the pdf size, you could reduce your eps/png figures manually before you include them into your tex file. There is also a very easy way if you have Adobe acrobat. You could use  “Advanced->PDF Optimizer”.  In the opened dialog, you can set the compression of figures, fonts, and other staff to reduce your pdf size. I just managed to reduce the size of my paper from 20MB to about 400KB.

An alternative way is to use PrimoPDF. It has several predefined settings for generating PDF best for screen, ebook, print, and prepress. It also supports customized settings.

If you already have an eps file, and still want to reduce its size. You could run the following code: (http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/pdf/)

> gs -r300 -dEPSCrop -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=fig.png -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE fig.eps
> convert -quality 80 fig.png fig.jpg
> convert fig.png eps3:fig.eps

Instead of using LaTex, you could also use PDFLaTex. In this case, you can use the following code to convert your figures to PDF files.

> for i in *eps; do ps2pdf -DEPSCrop $i; done
> sed -i ‘s/\.eps}/}/g’ *tex