Re: RFH: non-blocking desktop conforming viewer

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

> > On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> >>>>    
> >>>>   PDF since format 1.4 has internal compression, meaning that
> >>>>   the other compression does not win a lot at all
> >>>>   We could advise packagers to use dh_compress -X.pdf
 
Le Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 02:06:56PM +0200, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard a écrit :
> 
> % ls -lh beameruserguide.pdf* pgfmanual.pdf*
> -rw-r--r-- 1 mpg mpg 1,5M août   6 13:44 beameruserguide.pdf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 mpg mpg 5,1M août   6 13:41 pgfmanual.pdf
> % gzip beameruserguide.pdf pgfmanual.pdf
> % ls -lh beameruserguide.pdf* pgfmanual.pdf*
> -rw-r--r-- 1 mpg mpg 1,4M août   6 13:44 beameruserguide.pdf.gz
> -rw-r--r-- 1 mpg mpg 4,9M août   6 13:41 pgfmanual.pdf.gz
> 
> Is a 5% or 7% gain in size really worth the trouble?

Hi,

PDF compression has been discussed similarly at least in 2006 and 2012.

 - http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/06/msg01015.html
 - http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2012/02/msg00056.html

Since compressing PDFs is not required by the Policy it has been proposed
to change Debhelper's defaults: http://bugs.debian.org/375406

If there is a consensus on the matter, perhaps #375406 can be reopened with
a good summary taking into account why it was closed (because there are
mainstream viewers that can open gzipped PDF files).

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan