Very large pdf file size

gmgartner · 04-22-2005, 12:01 PM

Greetings,

When printing pdf's through the "native" Gnome pdf printer I end up with ~ 7 Mb files. The same document output to pdf on an M$ XP box via PDFCreator yields a ~ 100 K file size. Any ideas as to how I can get my file size down without having to get on the XP box would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Simon Bridge · 04-23-2005, 10:36 PM

Hang on - are you trying to print an existing pdf file or are you trying to print-to-file and the file is pdf format?

If the latter - if you can save the document in post-script you can probably use a ps to pdf converter - in a pinch. It's been a while since I've visited this, since I use pdflatex for this sort of thing.

gmgartner · 04-23-2005, 11:26 PM

I'm printing a gnumeric spreadsheet. More accurately, I'm outputting it to file as pdf. I'll give the ps to pdf conversion a shot... The ps file is 7.2 Mb and the resultant pdf output is a mere 134.7 K. Any way to eliminate the middle man here?

Simon Bridge · 04-26-2005, 02:14 AM

My experience is that this is what gnumeric is supposed to be doing anyway - i.e. exporting to ps or eps and then converting to pdf. I have no idea what gnumeric thinks it's doing - possibly it is treating the entire sheet as a high res graphic or something. You may want to twiddle the printer settings in print-to-file?

However, I'd go winge to the gnumeric developers ... if they know about it there'll be a faq or something on their board.

(Well done btw: I usually have to walk folk through that...)

gmgartner · 04-27-2005, 10:11 AM

Good Call, Simon. I din't think to output from another program - these all make reasonably sized pdf's. It looks like it is just gnumeric

gmgartner · 04-28-2005, 11:23 AM

I ended up installing OOo and all is good now - in fact, the pdf's are a bit smaller than I had expected, say 15 % compared to the gnumeric ps to pdf conversion. They are even a bit smaller than the PDFCreator output on the windows box. I didn't have a specific need for gnumeric - just an M$ compatible spreadsheet program so - there you have it!