[R] Shrink file size of pdf graphics

[Aaron Mackey]

You can try something like this, at the command line:

  gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

evidently, the new compactPDF() function in R 2.13 does something very similar.

-Aaron

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 19/05/2011 11:14 AM, Layman123 wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> My data consists of a system of nearly 75000 roads, available as a
>> shapefile. When I plot the road system, by adding the individual roads with
>> 'lines' and store it as a pdf-file with 'pdf' I get a file of size 13 MB.
>> This is way too large to add it in my LaTeX-document, because there will be
>> some more graphics of this type.
>> Now I'm curious to learn wheter there is a possibility in R to shrink the
>> file size of this graphic? I merely need it in a resolution so that it looks
>> "smooth" when printed out. I don't know much about the storage of R
>> graphics, but maybe there is a way to change the way the file is stored
>> perhaps as a pixel image?
>
>
> There are several possibilities.  You can use a bitmapped device (e.g. png()) to save the image; pdflatex can include those.
>
> You can compress the .pdf file using an external tool like pdftk (or do it internally in R 2.14.x, coming soon).
>
> There are probably others...
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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