[pdftex] pdftex & file size...

Thierry Bouche Thierry.Bouche at ujf-grenoble.fr
Mon Nov 12 11:59:12 CET 2001


Hi,

I face the following problem, which was always there, but gets quite
annoying in this peculiar case...

I have a PDF file (a small (150 p.) science book with 80+ images,
most of them vector arts, and hyperlinks).

i make the PDFs for images with distiller, they use the same fonts as
the main text, from (AI, fontless) EPS of 50 K, I get PDFs of 300 K
(imbedding or not the fonts makes essentially no difference, and
obviously pdftex does the good job of factorizing the fonts in both
cases) 

the output of pdftex is 23 MB
if I distill this to a PDF at 1200 dpi, I get a 2.5 MB file.

The pdftex file being the one (after optimization) intended for web
delivery, this is almost inacceptable.

The pdf consultant of acrobat 5 can't reduce it by more than a few
K's, what is puzzling is that it thinks that 95 % of the objects are
of type 'unknown' (which appears to be 45 % after distillisation)

Does anyone here understand why pdftex files are so big?

Is there out there any solution (even a commercial plug-in) that would 
allow the kind of optimisation that distiller does, _without_ killing
the hyperthings?

Thanks,

-- 
Thierry Bouche



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