Sofar I received 2 reactions. (1) Can't reproduce here; I get a 70KB pdf with your file and image. ConTeXt standalone, 32-bit Linux, mkiv, version 2011.10.01 10:48. (2) I've encountered the same problem. The PDF is 1.8MB big. Compressed with qpdf (qpdf --stream-data=compress) its only 60KB! Latest beta on OS-X 10.7.2 Further search for the cause: My system is also OS-X 10.7.2 and latest beta. To find the culprit I reverted to an older version of ConTeXt. ConTeXt ver: 2011.10.14 22:47 MKIV fmt: 2011.11.11 int: english/english Now the filesize becomes 72KB instead of 1.8 MB. This one seems OK. CONCLUSION: This must have been introduced in one of the beta's later than 2011.10.14 and in or before the current one: ConTeXt ver: 2011.11.04 14:15 MKIV. I kindly suggest Hans takes a look into the matter. Hans van der Meer On 10 nov. 2011, at 21:22, Hans van der Meer wrote:
Something terrible must be done to png pictures, either in ConTeXt or in luatex. I have the following minimal sample code and picture. I include the png for those who want to check.
% Test png addition. \starttext Place png figure.\par \placefigure{Test figure}{\externalfigure[test.png]} \stoptext
Without the png-picture it makes an 8KB pdf. But with the png-picture the pdf swells to 1.8MB. And that for a png-picture of only 48KB. Moreover making a zip of all this stuff brought the size back to 110KB. In the log: ConTeXt ver: 2011.11.04 14:15 MKIV fmt: 2011.11.10 int: english/english mkiv lua stats > graphics processing time - 0.001 seconds including tex, 1 processed images