OT: PDF bloat (was: Re: Two for the road, Report from Clerk & Nonstandard Subtotals)

[Fairlight]

Is it just me, or did Jay Ashworth say:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 08:22:22AM -0500, Fairlight wrote:
> > 
> > Never insert anything in your ear that's smaller than your elbow.  PDF's
> > are notoriously BLOATED, and thus should not be hurting your ears unless
> > inserted with the Jaws of Life device.  
> 
> Let's remember that PDF's don't *need* to be bloated.
> 
> You can bloat a PDF either by including lots of fonts (which may or may
> not be necessary), or by inadvertantly building the wrong *kind* of
> PDF: a rendered page image wrapped in a PDF file is *not* what you
> want, usually.

I was working with a specification file in PDF.  The releasing party's
original PDF was 1.25MB.  That was last year's.  This year's had very small
revisions and grew by exactly one page.  The new spec is also laid out
pretty much identically.  They hardly touched it.  It's now 12.2MB.

Considering people's propensity for not doing more than they absolutely
have to, I would chalk the bloat up to newer versions of Acrobat, off-hand.
Nowhere near enough about the document changed to account for 10MB+ of
difference.  Unless the images that were rolled in weren't shrunk
appropriately, which I suppose is possible.

It's still the most bloated format known to man, seconded by TIFF.
Although I've seen some TIFF's that can give PDF's a good run for their
money in bloat factor.  Notably, a 1.85MB TIFF that was in BLACK AND WHITE
that reduced nicely to a 117K GIF and lost no quality at all.  The idiot
that encoded it should have been fired for gross incompetence.

Out of curiosity, can PDF's be compressed?  I've never tried.  But if they
can, places should.  If they already "are", it's Not Good Enough, just like
TIFF's lousy compression (I can still get another 30% compression on a
"compressed" TIFF from gzip--without the -9.)

In any event, even 1.25MB to represent a mere 167 pages is somewhat
realistic, since there were some images rolled in as well.  But 12.5MB for
virtually the same document?  No.  -I- don't think so.

I still detest PDF.  The sizes, the horrible viewer, the inability of most
of the OSS tools to properly convert them consistently to text (despite
their claims)--all of it.  I'm still not sure why PDF was "necessary" at
all.  We already had PS and EPS.  What wasn't good enough?  Nobody's ever
pointed me towards anything that explains that.  And you don't have
PDF-capable printers to my knowledge, so it makes even less sense, since
you have to rely -entirely- on software now.

mark->
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