[Gnumed-devel] GNUmed > pdflatex generating bloated PDFs

[Busser, Jim]

Apparently, pdflatex incorporates more font information than is required in PDF 
documents.

This seems to account for what -- in my opinion -- is unacceptable, 3-fold 
bloat in the size of PDFs. As one example, one of the letters that I generated 
with GNUmed and which was barely over a page long ended up at 230K which is 
huge, compared to the fact that *scanned* paper (or e-faxes) are only about 
70-100K per page.

Apparently the open source ghostscript (or Adobe's products) will achieve much 
smaller PDFs. The best posting that I could find on this makes reference, in 
one of the comments, to

        a python-script called pdfsizeopt.py, code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt
        which reduces the size of pdfs. I use it frequently, but with texlive 
2010 you
        need to begin your *.tex-file with\pdfminorversion4

and the same thread, in the bottom 'answers', references a whitepaper that came 
to the same conclusion of recommending the above python script, and the 
'answer' concludes with:

        The final recommended workflow for small PDFs is:
        1. use pdftex;
        2. process with pdf enhancer or acrobat pro if you have them;
        3. process with pdfsizeopt (including the optional multivalent step).

here is the thread

        
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/19956/which-one-produces-a-pdf-with-the-smaller-file-size-pdflatex-or-latex-dvips-ps2

from which came the links

        http://code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt/
        
http://code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt/downloads/detail?name=pts_pdfsizeopt2009.psom.pdf

Less optimal but perhaps easier (?) could be to use one of the other approaches 
referenced above, namely to use ps2pdf (a wrapper script which uses ghostscript)

        http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2004-June/005046.html

which is similar advice to

        latex + dvips + ps2pdf reduces the file size by almost 3 times

        
http://7fttallrussian.blogspot.com/2011/02/latex-reduce-pdf-file-size-with-latex.html

and

        "DO use dvips to create PostScript file"
        "Use Acrobat Distiller (or ghostscript) to convert PostScript to PDF

        http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/edu/latex/latex-pdf.html

Feasible to adopt? Otherwise every 4 pages of *text* generated by GNUmed will 
cost one Mb or thereabouts, and that is just too much (IMO).

-- Jim