On Thursday 16 June 2005 02:07 pm, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
David A. Desrosiers wrote: A pdf is a chunked file format and each chunk can be compressed or even encrypted. A run-of-the-mill pdf is always at least compressed.
If you create your own pdf with pdftex you can set the compression level to 0 and lo! the text magically appears inside the pdf.
And if you're truly insane (and or interested) in the format, you can obtain the specs and learn how to write a PDF by hand in a standard text editor. (Which, yes, I have done, including writing vector graphics.) If you understand the technique, you can even write simple scripts in (your interpreted language of choice) to output simple PDF files directly, which is great for doing things like cgi report generation without library dependencies and the like. iirc, the most commonly used compression in PDF is FLATE, which is relatively trivial and fast/good enough for the majority of cases.