[OS X TeX] trim pdf figures

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 09:13:05AM +0200, Maarten Sneep wrote:
> On 22 jun 2004, at 22:43, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> 
> >Le 22 juin 04, ? 21:27, Siep Kroonenberg a ?crit :
> >
> >>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.

In a test I got 15850 bytes before cropping, 13275 after.
I decompressed both with the multivalent tools, and it looks like
there has been a lot of rewriting.

> 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

Of course, if one is scripting anyway, one can easily compress the
output from pstopdf with the multivalent tools as a final step.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg
siepo at cybercomm.nl
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