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

[Jim Diamond]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 12:55 (+0100), Thierry Bouche wrote:

> It is funny to observe that while the trend for the ubiquitous format
> like XML (do you see a strong demand for compressed SVG?) is to have
> hyper-verbose uncompressed representation of content, we should care
> so much about the size of PDF files.

It turns out that some people have noticed the horrible, horrible
bloat of XML... there are a number of papers on XML-specific data
compression, including techniques to be able to efficiently) query an
XML file without decompressing any more data than necessary.  It isn't
a big research area, but it is an active one.

> I've been told that most text file transfer over the networks are
> compressed on the fly by the routers (?) so that the actual impact
> on bandwidth might be zero.
Really?  I hadn't heard that.  In any case, for people working from
home there is the last bit of the data path, which is where the
bottleneck is.  Even if the ISPs compress the data through most of the
path, the bandwidth to my ADSL "modem" is capped, and there is the
problem for me when d/l'ing PDF files.

Cheers.
				Jim

P.S. While I sympathize with Philip Taylor's situation, I feel that
holding back progress because a few (?) people have valid reasons to
use "old" versions of software is not good.  Perhaps those people who
find the need to keep PDF 1.4 capability could form a group and put in
the effort to keep this capability in newer versions of TeX software?
(I know, that is really easy for me to say, since I'm not in that group.)

-- 
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