On 07-Feb-02 tom potts wrote:

Probably best to regard PDF as a way of making small documents a lot bigger without having to use M$ Word!

I respectfully disagree with this [ aka bollocks :) ].

Outside of the domain of plain text documents, if you want a _formatted_ (typeset) document then your document is inevitably bigger because of the formatting information required.

PostScript is reasonably economical. Example: the troff source for a quite complex doc I'm writing right now is 40808 bytes. The PS file created from this is 76101 bytes (x2). Not bad, considering how much "meta-information" is needed to get the rendering right.

However, after 'ps2pdf' this PS file converts to a PDF file of size 40667 bytes -- actually smaller than the original! (of course, there is compression involved here; if I turn off compression I end up with 207810 (x5), much of which seems to be due to expressing coordinates to greater precision and using longer abbreviations for commands, as well as the PDF document structuring "wrapper"). And note that this is a complex document with graphs and all, therefore with demanding formatting requirements.

So PDF can in fact be rather economical, at worst nothing like the bloat factors you can sometimes get with MS word files (which are still in intermediate "tagged" form, not yet formatted).

As a moderate example: a Word document sent to me is totally simple plain text -- one para after another, no fancy formatting needed. Text content: 12880 bytes; Word file: 39936 bytes (x3); size when printed to PS file: 196608 bytes (x15)!

And, as a similarly moderate example on the other side: One of my simple plain-text documents has text content: 27375 bytes (i.e. without formatting tags) troff source: 31209 bytes (with formatting tags) PS file size: 62715 bytes (x2) PDF file size: 36166/86043 bytes (compressed/uncompressed) (i.e. x1/x3 relative to troff source, x0.5/x1.5 relative to PS file). So, in this case, I certinaly respectfully disagree.

And finally, PDF as a format has advantages over PS in that you can use PDF Annotations, thumbnails, indexes, and hyperlinks of various kinds. In a world where doing work on Linux involves achieving some sort of compatibility with The Rest, PDF is your friend because They can handle it. But it should be _good_ PDF, so don't use sloppy software (but I don't need to tell you that).

Best wishes to all, Ted.

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