Optimizing the generated pdf (was: [NTG-pdftex] Re: [dev-context] Re: \showskips bug)

On 2005-11-17 09:31:19 +0100, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

This is mostly the required page objects. 3 objects are used per actual (totally empty) page:

13 0 obj << /Length 0 >> stream endstream endobj

This one is even longer with compresslevel > 0. It would be nice to not compress empty streams, but I think that would be too difficult to implement and isn't needed very often.

12 0 obj << /Type /Page /Contents 13 0 R /Resources 11 0 R /MediaBox [0 0 595.2756 841.8898] /Parent 7 0 R >> endobj 11 0 obj << /ProcSet [ /PDF ] >> endobj

And 11 and 13 are created for every page. :-( 11 could simply be empty (or null) for empty pages. Looking at , it doesn't seem too difficult to optimize for empty Resources. Of course, the question is: How often do we have empty /Resources? Normally they at least have a /Font entry. If we start optimizations like these, it would be nice to move the /MediaBox to the root object (or pages) and write it only for different-sized pages (Hans: ConTeXt writes /TrimBox and /CropBox on every page (even if they are allways the same); adding them to pdfpagesattr instead would save quite some space -- look at pdftex-a.pdf).

It is a bit wasteful to keep those in the indirects objects table for ever and onwards, but I am not sure if it is doable to flush them right away. (CC ntg-pdftex)

I don't think that optimizations like these are generally usefull as they are seldom needed and make the code more complex. When I look at a typical result of ConTeXt or hyperref, they seem unneeded. Btw: Is there a tool that compresses a pdf by replacing identical objects with references? Best Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de