[reportlab-users] reducing filesize of created pdf

[Robin Becker]

Jerome Alet wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 03:17:44PM -0800, Britt Hibbert wrote:
> 
>>I apologize if this has been answered previously in the list, but 
>>I could not locate any information on it in the docs or on the list. 
>>Is there any way to reduce the filesize of the pdf that is created 
>>by reportlab, perhaps by rendering at a reduced quality? 
> 
> 
> You could use the beginForm/endForm/doForm methods when you have
> some repetitive things to do.
> 
> Also if some images appear several times, use drawImage instead
> of drawInlineImage.
> 
> These are two ways to save possibly very very huge disk space without
> reducing the quality.
> 
> If you don't have repetitive things on your document, then I don't know
> 
....

good points; ensure you have the pageCompression flag turned on in rl_config.py
and try to make images as small as possible. JPEGs seem to be the preferred 
format. We put all images through a compression phase, but we lose native 
compression modes for anything other than jpeg (because it has to be converted 
into 2 3 or 4 width x height layers (ussually one byte/pixel). The compression 
we use doesn't know about the images at all so can't take best advantage of them.

A minor saving can be had by changing the line DoComments = 1 in 
pdfbase/pdfdoc.py to DoComments = 0

Using only standard fonts eliminates the embedding/subsetting cost of using 
bespoke T1/TTF fonts.
-- 
Robin Becker