(j3.2006) (SC22WG5.3505) [ukfortran] N1705 (08-007)

[Malcolm Cohen]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:31:20 +0900, John Reid <j.k.reid at rl.ac.uk> wrote:

re PDF vs PostScript

> The one advantage it has is size:
> -rw-r--r--  1 jkr numerical 8638125 Jan 15 09:38 N1705.pdf
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 jkr numerical 1276776 Jan 15 09:38 N1705.ps.gz

That's because
(1) you haven't compressed the PDF
(2) the PDF has ***LOTS*** more info than the PS, viz
     (a) colour,
     (b) lots and lots of hyperlinks
(3) PDF doesn't compress as well as PostScript anyway, presumably
     because Adobe are storing more info in there e.g. to make it
     searchable - a valuable feature!

The colour isn't valuable in itself, and it will go away in the FCD,
but the hyperlinks are very valuable in my experience, even if they
don't work so well after printing.

(The colour is there to draw the attention of J3/WG5 members to the
presence/absence of hyperlinking of defined terms etc..  Mostly so they
can ask for extra things to be hyperlinked, but if things are being
hyperlinked and aren't useful they can be requested to be removed too.)

Anyway, the PDF version is the official version and isn't going away,
so unless the PostScript version *HAS NEGATIVE SIZE* keeping it has
no size advantage.

BTW, bzip2 nearly always gets 5-10% more compression than gzip, and is
available widely on Windows and Linux so I'd recommend bzipping things
if we want to compress them.

Cheers.
-- 
................Malcolm Cohen (malcolm at nag-j.co.jp)