Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

On Sat, 3 May 2008 07:50:05 -0400 John Culleton wrote:

...

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

lm type 1 in pftex is less efficient than opentype in xetex/luatex there may also be some different initial overhead per engine ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------