[pdftex] [tex-live] PDF 1.5 by default in TL 2010

[Élie Roux]

2010/1/12 Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
> 1) You appear to believe that generating PDF 1.5 would
>   be an improvement; this is surely the very point
>   being debated, rather than an /a priori/ given.

It is an improvement in the sense that it allows \pdfobjcompression
which decreases the size of the PDFs. For me having smaller PDFs is an
improvement, as well as for 99% of users : it saves disk space and
bandwidth, and thus polar bears (although it would be interesting to
see if the additional power consumption due to the compression is
lower that the average consumption of the saved bandwidth)... So I
guess the whole point is to know whether it's better to have small
PDFs or PDFs readable by a 9 year-old software... does TeXLive have
something like a voting system?

If it's not a good default value for pdfTeX, can it be at least the
default for LuaTeX? People working with luatex certainly know they are
dealing with modern things not mandatorily compatible with 2001
softwares... and the LuaTeX manual cannot be viewed by Acrobat 5.05
anyway (it is \pdfobjcompressed).

Also it's strange that you manage to open the microtype pdf, it bugs
the same way for 5.05 as for 6.0 (I see only blank pages and I have
some error messages all the time).

Thank you,
-- 
Elie