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

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Fairlight (Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:44:45 -0500):
[...]
> 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.

I saw a similar increase when I switched from PageMaker to InDesign.  I
generated a new PDF from ID after importing it from PM, and the PDF grew
by (as I recall) about 8 times.  Adobe chalked this up to the fact that
ID supports DBCS.  (How, using 2 bytes for text within the document,
rather than one, will cause an 8-fold increase in the document size, I
never got answered.)

[...]
> 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.

I don't see TIF as bloated, unless you use _uncompressed_ TIFF, in which
case it's just as "bloated" as any other uncompressed image file.  (Or,
the TIFF was stored as 24-bit color, even though it's monochrome.)

> 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.)

I only get a few percent compression with pkzip, for both compressed TIFFs
and PDFs.  (Though I can also get 90%+ with uncompressed TIFFs.)

[...]
> 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.

PS and EPS are "output-only" formats, describing how the page should look.
PDF, which as I understand it is PS-based or PS-like, goes beyond that,
including such things as links, document structure, input fields, and
other interactive-based features.  Of course, most people use it as a
device-independent document viewing format, for which PS would suffice
if you were to have a PS viewer.

There's probably a whitepaper on Adobe's website somewhere.

--
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