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

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>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.
...
>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.

I don't do a lot with PDF, generally converting PostScript to PDF using
ps2pdf or convert from ImageMagick, and find that the PDF files are usually
much smaller than the original PS.  This, and the fact that almost anybody
can handle PDF files, provides a reasonable way to transmit formatted text
for printing.

This was very useful to me when my wife and I were selling a house in
Olympia, WA.  The agent would fax us 20 page contracts which I would then
print, sign and initial everything, scan them back in directly to PDF (it's
nice to have a scanner with ADF for this :-), put the resulting file in a
private directory on one of our web sites, then e-mail the agent a URL
pointing to the PDF.  I do find it rather ``interesting'' that the whole
process occurred without the real estate agent having a single real
signature from us.

Bill
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