Re: Reduce size of PDF files when inc. in *TeX docs (issue 194090043 by address@hidden)

[dak]

On 2015/01/15 07:08:33, lemzwerg wrote:
> David's concerns are very specific to the Lilypond documentation, not
covering
> the general case.  Many programs simply can't process PS output at
all, so the
> suggestion to collect PS data that gets reduced later on is not
applicable.

> The only valid alternative is to make Lilypond natively produce PDF,
but this is
> a long-term solution.  And it seems to me that even then we will need
a
> '--bigpdf' option (but implemented in a different way) to allow
optimal PDF
> merging later on by post-processing tools.

> For this reason I vote to include Knut's work right now, since it
quickly solves
> the given issue in a reliable way, with the only ugliness of having
very large
> intermediate files.

Reliable?  If I remember correctly, the tool used for combining the
fonts (ppdfsizeopt.py) fails on the PDF files from PDFLaTeX, so there
must be an additional iteration through GhostScript.  This additional
iteration will reencode and resample included bitmap graphics at some
command line option dependent resolution, correct?  What happens with
hyperlinks?  Has anybody checked those?

At any rate, I've taken a look at the description of pdfsizeopt, and it
would appear that it is optimized for working on PDF files created by
PDFTeX.  That would imply that it would be
a) really a good idea to get along without using Ghostscript as an
intermediary.  That seems like it would require fixing pdfsizeopt.  Its
project page contains a link "Doesn't pdfsizeopt work with your PDF?
Report the issue".  Now there is a remarkable dearth of names on the web
pages, but from other projects and content under this account and the
account's name I should be surprised if this project is not owned by
Szabó Péter.  And I should be surprised if he does not manage to fix the
problem when reported or suggest a full quality workaround.
b) in a similar vein, I'd ask Péter for suggestions about the best
course for having the font compaction work without blowing up the
intermediate files all too much.  Of course I am speculating on him just
making pdfsizeopt do all the work, but even if not, he'll be likely to
come up with a good plan.

The downside to the choice of using pdfsizeopt here is that it does not
currently seem to be easily available preinstalled for Ubuntu (and it
has a number of dependencies making preinstallation desirable).  Maybe
that will change in future.

With regard to a PDF file example for pdfsizeopt, maybe reporting the
Notation manual is a bit unwieldy.  The "Learning" manual should likely
have the same kind of problems, right?

https://codereview.appspot.com/194090043/