I need to shrink some large PDFs to print on an 8.5x11 inch (standard letter) page. Can ImageMagick/Ghostscript handle this sort of thing, or am I having so much trouble because I'm using the wrong tool for the job?
Just relying on the 'shrink to page' option in client-side print dialogs is not an option, as we'd like for this to be easy-to-use for the end users.
The problem with using ImageMagick is that you are converting to a raster image format, increasing file size and decreasing quality for any vector elements on your pages.
Multivalent will retain the vector information of the PDF. Try:
java -cp Multivalent.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 1x1 -paper "8.5x11in" myFile.pdf
to create an output file myFile-up.pdf