[pdftex] Re: pdftex Digest, Vol 12, Issue 7

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "ivo" == ivo welch <ivo.welch at yale.edu> writes:

    > I am so spoiled now by pdflatex, where everything seems to work
    > almost flawlessly, that I would have loved to see linearizing as
    > an intrinsic feature.

Some people suggested this before.  There are good reasons not to do
this.  pdfTeX is an extension to Knuth's TeX.  TeX ships out a page if
it is full to a file, thus you can process almost arbitrary large
documents.  An optimizer has to rearrange objects and this is a
different thing.

IMHO, optimization is a bit more than just linearization.  Converting
Type1 fonts to CFF would make the files much smaller, especially if
the advanced typesetting features of pdfTeX are used.  There are
whitespaces in the PDF files which can be removed.  And the encryption
code has been removed from pdfTeX because it made the program hard to
maintain.

A postprocessor has a lot of advantages.  You need it only once when
the document is ready but not for proof reading.  This saves a lot of
time, and such a program would be more reliable than an extended
pdfTeX.  Note that pdfTeX is based on Knuth's TeX written in WEB,
which is a PASCAL dialect, the extensions are written in WEB and C and
it uses some external libraries written in C and C++.

Ghostscript provided an "optzimizer" for some years but only recent
versions are able to deal with files produced by pdfTeX.  I suppose
that pdfopt has a very low priority.  There are indeed some other
problems in gs with a higher priority.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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