[OS X TeX] Creating a Sensible PDF Document

[Philipp Mathey]

I am also interested in the same question (or at least a part of it) :
If I wanted to create a document with say xelatex that
can be read on some machine not running mac os x . say a system  
running Linux with xpdf,
would I have to choose the option to have all fonts embedded in the  
document
during the configuration phase even though this will create a much  
larger
document ? Is that the only way ?

>
> Note that as document length increases, the benefit of using the  
> standard fonts and avoiding any font embedding becomes negligible  
> compared to the overall size of the document (and other aspects of  
> the space-efficiency of the PDF code generated).
>

I don't fully understand that sentence.  So you are saying that one
should embed fonts ? Could you elaborate ?


> I just compared the results of latex+dvips+ps2pdf14 versus xelatex 
> +xdvipdfmx (see below) and found that while a short (3-page)  
> document generated a smaller PDF using your option (1), duplicating  
> the text a number of times to make a 23-page version resulted in a  
> much smaller PDF with (3b).
>


>
> Then there's choice 3b: xelatex can be run (on Mac OS X) with  
> either the default xdv2pdf output driver, or with xdvipdfmx (the  
> portable driver also used on Linux/Windows/etc). The results can be  
> dramatically different: in many cases, xdvipdfmx generates  
> significantly more compact PDF. To do this, you call xelatex with  
> the -output-driver option, e.g:

While I have not noticed any differences in the appearance between
xelatex documents compiled with xdvipdfmx instead of xdv2pdf,
I did notice that xdvipdfmx is significantly faster than xdv2pdf.

Thanks,
PM

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