Re: Not impressed with pdflatex

atgraham@xxxxxxxxx writes:

> What should I be expecting with pdflatex? Is it just not very mature
> or usable yet? Are there undocumented command line options I should be
> using? Or was dvips leaving out "important" information all along?

As Heiko said already, one would need more information to find out
what's going on here. There is, however, one point where latex/dvips/
ps2pdf does indeed give smaller sized documents than pdflatex. This is
for documents whose size is dominated by the size of the embedded Type1
fonts. GhostScript uses a more efficient algorithem for this than
pdflatex. Without the actual files one can't judge whether or not this
explains your findings.

Just for comparison. I have here a 170 pages PDF file with many line
drawings (MetaPost) and only 14 embedded fonts. Clearly, the document
size is dominated by the actual text and the figures. With pdflatex,
this file is 1.1 MB large and compresses to 751 kB with gzip. With
latex/dvips/ps2pdf the file is 1.2 MB large and compresses to 917 kB
with gzip.

cheerio
ralf
.