[Discuss] Scripting/Programming Challenge

[Darren Duncan]

On 2015-06-02 8:09 PM, Murray Strome wrote:
> I am leading a new SIG at the Victoria Computer Club -- Scribus (a free, open
> source, cross platform Desktop Publishing (DTP) software package).
>
> The normal output from Scribus is a PDF document. I have found that the
> documents created tend to be VERY large.  I found a Perl script (which I
> modified slightly) which does an excellent job of compressing the original PDF
> document, usually by a factor of 10-15. I have been unable to see any
> significant difference in the quality of documents PRINTED from the original or
> compressed result. The main difference between the two that I have noticed is
> that in the compressed version, you cannot search for or copy any of the text in
> it on your computer. I suspect that the text is converted to vector form, but am
> not certain.

Its strange you say that since usually the tiniest PDF files are the ones that 
represent text internally as text rather than generic vectors, so if you already 
have text it should stay that way targeting size.  Usually PDFs created by 
scanning a document are much bigger by default being an image. -- Darren Duncan