[Tex/LaTex] Which one produces a pdf with the smaller file size? pdflatex or latex-dvips-ps2pdf

dvipspdftexps2pdf

Assume I have a screenshot in png format and make a copy of it in eps format by using ImageMagick.

I create two input file, namely ForPNG.tex and ForEPS.tex. ForPNG.tex imports the png image and is compiled by pdflatex. ForEPS.tex imports the eps image and is compiled by latex-dvips-ps2pdf.

The question is, which one produces the smaller pdf file in size?

In my experience, ForEPS.pdf will be smaller than ForPNG.pdf. But I am not sure whether it is a summary.

Best Answer

Despite my comment to the original question, I have now come to the conclusion that the latex-dvips-ps2pdf route produces smaller PDF files than pdflatex alone.

However, in my answer to How to make the PDFS produced by pdflatex smaller I suggested to use gs to compress the resulting PDF, which gets you a significant reduction in size. As ps2pdf is as well built on gs internally, one can also directly pass compression options to ps2pdf, so in the end it should not matter.

I made some quick experiments with a beamer presentation. In these experiments the pdflatex-gs route lead to only 1 percent smaller PDFs than latex-dvips-ps2pdf.

So the bottom line is: With respect to the goal of small PDF files, it doesn't matter.

You can just choose your frontend depending on other constraints (e.g., latex-dvips-ps2pdf if you use pstricks or pdflatex-gs to support transparencies in pgf/tikz images).

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] File size difference between XeLaTeX and pdfLaTeX

For you minimal example it is the font format which makes the difference. This can be seen by comparing the PDFs in an editor which supports binary (like vim).

Also pdffonts is helpful:

xelatex: (1874 bytes compressed, 2444 bytes uncompressed)
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
ZOJBFE+CMR10                         Type 1C           yes yes no       6  0


pdflatex: (10785 bytes compressed, 11677 bytes uncompressed)
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
SLFVOY+CMR10                         Type 1            yes yes no       2  0

The pdffonts manual states that "Type 1C" is the Compact Font Format (CFF) which is as the name says more compact.

With larger projects, I was still able to reduce the size by a factor of 2 with no noticeable changes in the output.

It depends on what font you are using and what you mean with "larger". I recently figured out that changing to T1 increase a 9-page manual (ydoc package) from 217K to 323K. Changing to the libertine font makes 482K out of it. See How to create small PDF files for the Internet for tips on how to reduce the file size.

[Tex/LaTex] What steps are done by XeLaTeX when compiling input files with PSTricks codes, jpeg, png, eps, pdf images

JPEG, PNG and PDF are directly supported by PDF format, then they're supported by xdvipdfmx directly. xetex program reads the image files to determine the bounding boxes and produce a .xdv file, then xdvipdfmx program put the image data to PDF output file.

PDF format does not support PostScript stream, thus EPS files are converted to PDF format and then put into PDF output file. xdvipdfmx calls GhostScript to do the trick.

PSTricks pacakge also calls GhostScript to render the PostScript code. The code needed is in xdvipdfmx.con. Herbert may give more explanations.

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[Tex/LaTex] File size difference between XeLaTeX and pdfLaTeX

[Tex/LaTex] What steps are done by XeLaTeX when compiling input files with PSTricks codes, jpeg, png, eps, pdf images

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