[pdftex] redundant objects with includegraphics

[Han The Thanh]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 11:59:14PM +0200, Andreas Matthias wrote:
> Including more than one pdf page with
> 
> \includegraphics[page=1]{dummy.pdf}
> \includegraphics[page=2]{dummy.pdf}
> 
> produces a lot of redundant information in the
> resulting pdf document. E.g. objects like the
> following exist for ever included page.
> 
> 21 0 obj
> <<
> /Ascent 694
> /CapHeight 683
> /Descent -194
> /ItalicAngle 0
> /StemV 69
> /XHeight 431
> /FontBBox [ -251 -250 1009 969]
> /Flags 4
> /FontName 24 0 R
> /FontFile 15 0 R
> >>
> endobj
> 
> Those objects are really identical!
> 
> The file size increases dramatically. E.g. if including
> every page of one document of 10 pages (document A) into
> another (document B), the file size increases at about
> 80%. (This is getting even worse, if including more pages.)
> 
> Document A: 10 pages, 19KB
> Document B: 10 pages, 33KB
> 
> Tested with:
> pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-14h-pretest-20010210 (Web2c 7.3.3.1)
> 
> Is it possible to change the include routine and to
> prohibit redundant objects in future pdftex versions?

it is of course possible. The problem is that it is not trivial to do so.
I did work hard to make pdftex check and remove duplicates of font files,
and this seems to be a worse nightmare. Maybe some nice day when I have a
real need of this feature.

Regards,
Thanh