[R] PDF Compression

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Eduardo Leoni wrote:
> PDF created by R is in vector format. If you really want smaller files
> you can try creating PNGs instead. With a high enough resolution (e.g.
> dpi=600) there won't be much difference in the printed version of your
> document.
>
> -eduardo
>   

Eduardo,

It is not a good idea in general to use a non-scalable graphics 
solution.  In general png can be larger than pdf but other disadvantages 
are more important.

When I have created curves in R that are composed of thousands of data 
points, the compression of pdf I've achieved with pdftk has been amazing.

Frank

>
>
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Benno Pütz<puetz at mpipsykl.mpg.de> wrote:
>   
>> Thanks for this advice - and to second Gabor's experience: I just
>> tried it on a couple of my files and achieved reductions on the order
>> of 90% (28.6MB to 4.4MB and 1.5GB to 170MB)!
>>
>> This file contains lots of small plots but also many scattersmooth()-
>> images ...
>>
>> So I think it does quite well in my case.
>>
>>        Benno
>>
>> Am 30.Jul.2009 um 12:21 schrieb Gabor Grothendieck:
>>
>>     
>>> I just tried it with a recent pdf that was generated from R on
>>> Windows Vista
>>> with "R version 2.9.1 Patched (2009-07-16 r48939)".  This particular
>>> one
>>> was laden with many graphs and was reduced to 25% of the original
>>> size so my experience with that one was that it made a huge
>>> difference.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 5:59 AM, David
>>> Keegan<david.keegan at shenick.com> wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Gabor,
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the suggestion. I tried pdftk but it made very
>>>> little difference.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> David.
>>>> --
>>>> [David Keegan david.keegan at shenick.com 353 1 2710818]
>>>> Gabor Grothendieck writes:
>>>>  > After generating the pdf try this using the free pdftk utilty:
>>>>  >
>>>>  >    pdftk infile.pdf output outfile.pdf compress
>>>>  >
>>>>  > On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 5:13 AM, David Keegan<david.keegan at shenick.com
>>>>         
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>           
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>>       


-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                     Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University