[OS X TeX] trim pdf figures

[Maarten Sneep]

On 22 jun 2004, at 22:43, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 22 juin 04, à 21:27, Siep Kroonenberg a écrit :
>
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 09:30:55AM -0400, Marcelo LaFleur wrote:
>>> I use Apple's Preview. You can  select a box around the graphic and 
>>> just
>>> crop the page.
>>
>> How safe is this for prepress purposes?
>
> I have noticed that cropping a graphical file inside Preview.app does 
> not affect the file size significantly. Hence it looks like only the 
> viewport is modified, not the content of the file itself.

I can confirm this: As some of you may know, I have a working version 
of pstoedit (pre-release, the main author is still working on some 
other modules, don't ask for a copy) . When translating the cropped pdf 
into xfig, or some other format, you'll get the contents you just cut 
off back again. Then again, for pre-press purposes this should make no 
difference, AFAICS.

> Beware, when using Panther's Distiller together with TeX: I have 
> processed recently a LaTeX file, based on the hyperref package, in the 
> TeX + Ghostscript mode of TeXShop, and noticed that if Panther's 
> Distiller is used instead of Ghostscript (as set in 
> Preferences/Misc/Distiller):
>
> - The bookmarks are suppressed.
>
> - The hyperlinks are suppressed, in the sense that their text is still 
> there, it looks like a hyperlink, but it works no longer as a 
> hyperlink.

That is because the Quartz PDFContext doesn't handle link objects by 
itself, it requires some additional code (Carbon based code to boot) to 
handle bookmarks. So the result is purely graphical, no other 
information. The situation is comparable to the handling of bookmarks 
and hyperlinks in TeXShop (i.e. none whatsoever) Don't forget it is the 
_printing_ system you're using, not a full distiller.

Also note that the files generated by this printing system are huge. 
Using the Multivalent tools, I could compress some pdf-files to about 
25% of their original size (without resorting to JPEG compression, and 
no cheating by using the bzip2 compression that Multivalent allows, the 
files still have the same pdf-version, and other than the size there 
are no apparent differences).

Regards,

Maarten
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