Re: [Swftools-common] Pdf2swf compression questions

[Matthias Kramm]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 12:54:38PM -0700, Chad Simmons wrote:
> I've tried using various compression options, but the problem is still
> that the resultant swf is too large for ease of use on the web (350k or
> so). Is there anyway to first tell what portions of the swf file are
> using the most space, and secondly compress those any better?
> Preliminary information seems to point to the text (and font info) as
> being the highest space hog. But it doesn't seem that changing the font
> quality improves the file size at all.
> 
> Any suggestions?

There's a number of items on the TODO list for making pdf2swf generate
smaller output.
At the current moment, the main problems are:

1.) Fonts-   for used fonts (especially for the 14 external standard
             fonts) at the current moment the whole character range
             is being embedded into the swf (I.e. also all umlauts
             and accents, arond 350 characters in total) instead
             of just the characters which are actually used.
2.) Shapes-  Shapes which occur once in a pdf (but are instantiated
             several times via macros) will get duplicated in the swf.
             This wouldn't be an issue if they would all be relative
             to the same start coordinate (because then zlib will
             take care of it as then the bytewise shapeencoding is
             identical too), but as of now, this isn't the case.
3.) Bitmaps- The current development version currently also creates
             duplicated bitmaps (older versions didn't)

I'm afraid these are all items which require development (on my side).
But once I got to doing this, there should be a definite improvement.

Greetings

Matthias