Re: [gentoo-user] PDF puzzle : files available

[Florian Philipp]

Am 14.01.2012 04:21, schrieb Philip Webb:
> 120113 Florian Philipp wrote:
>> Am 13.01.2012 11:32, schrieb Philip Webb:
>>> I've been in the habit of creating PDFs of .odt files using LibreOffice.
>>> I was reminded of 'ps2pdf', which resulted in :
>>>   -rw-r--r-- 1 purslow users    34475 Jan 12 07:52 boox.odt
>>>   -rw-r--r-- 1 purslow users   366711 Jan 13 04:05 boox.pdf
>>>   -rw-r--r-- 1 purslow purslow 830909 Jan 13 04:07 boox.ps
>>>   -rw-r--r-- 1 purslow purslow  67184 Jan 13 04:07 boox-test.pdf
>>> Both PDFs seem the same when opened with Xpdf or Okular,
>>> but the PDF created with LO direct export is  5 times
>>> the size of the PDF created with a test run of Ps2pdf ;
>>> the .ps file created with LO & then used for the latter is even bigger.
>>> Can anyone explain what is going on ?
>> Try the pdfdebugger provided by dev-java/pdfbox to inspect both files.
>
> That needs Java, which I am definitely not going to re-install (smile).
>

Well, I'll resist the temptation to start a flamewar over this ;)

>> Maybe one of them uses a stupid internal structure.
>
> OpenOffice was notorious for legacy bloat, so that would make sense.
> LO devs have managed to remove a large amount of useless code.
>
>> I couldn't reproduce this with app-office/libreoffice-3.4.3.2-r1
>> & cups-pdf , which should use the same backend as ps2pdf .
>> the files were nearly equal in size,  c 60 kB  for about 1 page of text.
>
> My file has  14 pp  of simple text.  I've now uploaded the files above
> & everyone can inspect them & their structure at
>
>   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~purslow/test/
>
> I've renamed the PDFs to show their origin, ie LibreOffice + Ghostscript.
> Perhaps that will allow others to investigate.
>
> I will also have a look at Cups-pdf & at Willie Wong's suggestions.
>
> PS the file is a list of books I've noted as worth reading,
> so it may have a wider (OT) interest than simply to solve this problem.
>

I can reproduce the behavior with my LO.

I've inspected the files with pdfdebugger. The LO-version really
contains more, but nothing which seems to justify the difference. In
fact, the content streams of each page seem to be better compressed in
th LO version.

Cups-PDF creates a smaller PDF than ps2pdf, probably because it outputs
PDF-1.5. Otherwise it is identical to the other ghostscript outputs.

Out of curiosity, I removed all pictures from an old report I wrote (25
pages) and tested that. There, Cups-PDF creates larger files than LO
although the internal structure is similar to what you've provided.

So I guess, all we can say is that their performance is inconsistent.

Regards,
Florian Philipp