[reportlab-users] PDF "optimization"

[Andy Robinson]

> Hi, I have a client who has complained that their PDF's are not 
> "optimized".
> 
> ReportLab has made creating these PDF's relatively easy. No, 
> scratch that, its made generating these PDF's *possible* but I'm 
> stumped on the "optimization". What does this mean? Does 
> ReportLab support it?

Well, you could ask them to read the PDF spec and ask which
features they wish to have supported :-)

My best guess is they mean 'linearized PDF', which is
somethign Acrobat can do to allow incremental downloads.
A smartbrowser can start displaying before the whole 
PDF is loaded across the network.  Normal PDFs have
a big binary index, which we write at the end of the
file.    FWIW the incremental download over the web
created more problems than it was worth.

We would add linearisation for money - not sure how much
but if this might be of interest, let me know and we'll
do an estimate - and would welcome a patch, but have no plans 
to add it.

The other possibility is that they generally want it
smaller.  If size is the problem, look hard at any
images; Photoshop and other Adobe tools can selectively
downsample images to be no bigger than appropriate.

If they aren't sure what they don't want, ask them
for an example of an 'optimized' one and we can look
at it.

- Andy