11.03
For a while now I’ve been baffled by the fact that OpenOffice.org doesn’t support exporting optimized PDFs, after playing a bit with Scribus (which has very extensive PDF export capabilities), it seems Scribus is also incapable of exporting optimized PDFs.
So what are optimized PDFs, well, usually when your want to view a PDF from the web, you first need to download the entire PDF and then you can view it. Optimized PDFs can be viewed on the fly while downloading them. So what’s the technical difference? Optimized PDFs have their contents rearranged to have resources like font, text and images sorted in the order they appear in the document, so the fonts, text and images on a particular page wil be grouped together. The optimized document also contains hints to allow jumping (skipping without downloading the skipped pages) between pages.
And then it hit me like a brick, at this time a small utility had been installed on my system capable of doing just that, optimizing a PDF:
# pdfopt original.pdf optimized.pdf
Please note the optimized file will be slightly larger than the original, although the difference will hardly be noticeble.
