Re: PDF files and dh_compress
On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 01:39:01PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> Jon Dowland <lists@alcopop.org> wrote:
>
> > At 1147099677 past the epoch, Craig Small wrote:
> >> Whatever the compression is, it is not too good.
> >> I'm getting about 10-30% compression on pdfs.
> >
> > Which raises the question, what is acceptable? I don't think
> > a 10% gain in itself is worth gzipping PDFs for. If 10% was
> > the "threshold", bzip2 should be used instead of gzip for
> > other things in /usr/share/doc.
> >
> > I think PDFs use ZIP internally. ZIP has compression ratios,
> > perhaps PDFs can be re-packed to use a higher ratio?
>
> If the PDF was generated by pdfTex on a Debian machine, the highest
> compression level (9) is already used. I don't know what happens when
> it's created via dvi->ps->pdf, and gs' documentation isn't clear about
> that, but ps2pdf14's pdf files are even slightly smaller (well, in a
> sample of two files...)
As far as I can see developer-reference and debian-reference packages,
PDF is quite compressive with gzip and it contains many ascii text in
it. So compression of that text part is good thing.
Under gnome desktop, I think fileroller takes care this issue of
compression. Under Galeon, it is not single click but just with one
more click pdf.gz opens with archive manager. So I see no inconvienience.
Osamu
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