Bug#289096: tetex-doc: pdf files should not be gzipped
Package: tetex-doc
Version: 2.0.2c-3
Severity: minor
PDF is usually already compressed (often a PDF file is roughly the
same size as the gzipped postscript), so gzipping a PDF file usually
does not save much space. Instead it inconveniences the user because
neither acroread (v5.0) nor xpdf (v3.00) opens compressed pdf files
(gv, i.e. ghostscript, is fine though). The user therefore either
must ask the sysadmin to uncompress the files in place in
/usr/share/doc/texmf/ or must uncompress it into a working directory.
Therefore could all the .pdf files be stored uncompressed?
$ dpkg -L tetex-doc | grep '\.pdf\.gz$' | wc -l
says there are 62 gzipped pdf files in tetex-doc.
This pipeline
$ gzip -l `dpkg -L tetex-doc | grep '\.pdf\.gz$'` \
| tail +2 \
| awk '{total1 += $1; total2 += $2}; END {print total1/total2};'
(output: 0.734089)
says that their total compressed size is about 73% of the uncompressed
total. It's a saving, but I don't think it's worth the hassle to the
user.
Whereas running the same command for the .ps.gz files says that the
compressed ps files take up, in total, about 40% of the space of the
uncompressed ones. That seems like a worthwhile saving, especially
since it causes no inconvenience because the main ps viewer (gv and/or
ghostscript) happily opens .ps.gz files. (Ditto for .dvi.gz files and
xdvi.)
Apologies if this issue is a Debian packaging policy decision that I
should discuss on a different list (let me know which one). Most of
the .pdf.gz files are from tetex-doc; the other major contributing
packages are doc-debian, apt-howto-*, and mit-scheme.
-Sanjoy
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i586)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-200412041
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Versions of packages tetex-doc depends on:
ii dpkg 1.10.25 Package maintenance system for Deb
-- no debconf information
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