[plug] pdf compression

[James Devenish]

In message <00ee01c3203e$e2c469d0$65123bcb at brad>
on Thu, May 22, 2003 at 04:48:15PM +0800, Brad Hill wrote:
> I ideally want to be able to re-transmit incoming pdf files out to our
> clients using the least amount of bandwidth possible

If bandwidth is your concern, consider "optimising" the PDFs. This
increases the overall file size (unless you have a lot of redundant PDF
objects, in which case the file size could decrease) but its principal
benefit (and purpose) if that you don't have to wait for the entire PDF
to be downloaded before you can begin viewing it. I don't know of any
non-commercial software for this, but there is a really good Java-based
PDF toolkit at SourceForge which could help you do this (I wouldn't even
be surprised if someone has already written such code). If, on the other
hand, volume is your concern, you can usually use GhostScript to
compress PDF files (though it doesn't always handle fonts well at all).
Relevant options may include:

    -dCompatibilityLevel=3
    -dASCII85EncodePages=false
    -dCompressPages=true
    -dUseFlateCompression=true
    -dSubsetFonts=true
    -d...ImageResolution
    -dDownsample...Images
    ...