[pdftex] Producing and optimizing PDF-1.2

[Ben Crowell]

Cosmin Truta wrote:
>... the pdfTeX versions later than 0.14a produce PDF-1.3 by default, and
>I am using pdfTeX-0.14f  under MiKTeX-2.0.
>Is it any way to convince newer versions of pdfTeX to produce PDF-1.2,

It may not even be possible to produce pdftex output that's
compatible with AR 4.0. If you have figures with text embedded
in them, there's a known bug in AR 4.0 that causes the text
to be garbled. This is fixed in AR 5.0, and apparently in 4.05
as well.

Re the size of the output, from what I understand, the compression
level actually isn't usually very important, unless you set it to
zero to produce human-readable PDF. It's hard to know how to
optimize compression without knowing exactly what kind of
document you have. Does it contain a lot of big bitmapped
graphics, for instance? If so, then compressing them appropriately
before you run pdftex is the main issue.