Re: [Gnumed-devel] GNUmed > pdflatex generating bloated PDFs

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 02:48:27AM +0000, Jim Busser wrote:

> Apparently, pdflatex incorporates more font information than is required in 
> PDF documents.
> 
> This seems to account for what -- in my opinion -- is
> unacceptable, 3-fold bloat in the size of PDFs. As one
> example, one of the letters that I generated with GNUmed and
> which was barely over a page long ended up at 230K which is
> huge, compared to the fact that *scanned* paper (or e-faxes)
> are only about 70-100K per page.

So, a worst case waste here would be 200K which, given the
availability of 1 Terabyte disk drives starting at 80 Euro,
will take to fill the drive:

        1024 KB * 1024 MB * 1024 GB = 1 TB / 250KB = 4294967 pages

        (11767 pages EVERY DAY FOR ONE YEAR)
        (2353 pages EVERY DAY FOR 5 YEARS)
        (98 pages scanned every hour every day for 5 years)

where

        1024 KB * 1024 MB * 1024 GB = 1 TB / 50KB = 21474836 pages

        (58835 pages every day for a year)
        (11767 pages every day for 5 years)
        (490 pages scanned every hour every day for 5 years)

IMHO:

- buy a disk
- work towards pdflatex generating better PDF
- if things are still a concern, write a script crawling
  the database optimizing any PDFs it finds

in that order of priority.

Karsten
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