On Sat, 3 May 2008 07:50:05 -0400
John Culleton
I am writing an e-book where pdf file length is an issue. For the minimal "Hello world" file I get the following lengths: tex+dvips+ps2pdf 2820 pdftex 5630 texexec 22,173
The only thing I added to the last test was the \starttext and \stoptext tags. The dvips etc. test defaulted to pdf 1.2, the other two to pdf 1.4. I don't doubt that with more text the counts would be more similar. Still the fourfold increase between the second test and the third is a stunner. The e-book must be limited to 2 megs per the publisher.
You could use XeTeX or LuaTeX instead of pdfTeX. My example \starttext Hello World! \stoptext with the file size for each engine: pdfTeX: 21.355 XeTeX: 3.155 LuaTeX: 3.328 Wolfgang