[tex-live] PDF 1.5 by default in TL 2010

Heiko Oberdiek oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de
Mon Jan 11 11:27:00 CET 2010


Hello,

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 05:47:33AM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> On 11 January 2010 Leo wrote:
> 
>  > On 2010-01-11 01:09 +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
>  > > For TL 2010, we would like to change the default PDF output version to
>  > > PDF 1.5 (proposed by Elie Roux). This is so we can use
>  > > \pdfcompresslevel and generate noticeably smaller PDF's by default.
>  > 
>  > Any idea how to set the pdf version to 1.5 in tl2009? I want to
>  > experiment this change a bit.
> 
> Set \pdfminorversion=5 in your documents but don't expect any
> improvement.
> 
> If you want to create smaller files, read the pdfTeX manual and look
> for "object stream compression".  Simply switching to PDF-1.5 is
> absolutely worthless.  You have to enable the features provided by the
> PDF-1.5 spec explicitly.  I tried "object stream compression" already
> and came to the conclusion that compressing these tiny things isn't
> worth the effort at all.

But if you have many of these tiny things (links, anchors, bookmarks, ...),
then it matters:

hyperref.dtx: 4634482 Bytes (\pdfminorversion=4)
hyperref.dtx: 1412019 Bytes (\pdfminorversion=5, \pdfobjcompresslevel=2)

This also raises the question, whether also the documentation
should be generated with \pdfminorversion=5, \pdfobjcompresslevel=2
to save space or is something similar to PDF/A (PDF-1.4) to be
preferred?

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>


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