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So I have 2D plot, made with DensityListPlot. Mathematica just cannot export them properly to PDF, so what I want to do is 1) export the plot itself, without axes, labels, etc, as a jpg image, and 2) Inset this image in an empty graphics containing only axes, labels etc. So far so good.

The problem is that when I export the final graphics to PDF, the image are not compressed at all -- and the file end up weighing 400k instead of 30k.

The question is: how do I specify the format and compression factor of images embedded in a pdf?

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  • $\begingroup$ Rasterize the image first maybe? $\endgroup$
    – fizzics
    Oct 10, 2012 at 10:07
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks Chris. I used gs instead of cutepdf to optimise the PDF, and it works very well. Still Wolfram really need to improve PDF export of 2D graphics... $\endgroup$
    – Mammouth
    Oct 10, 2012 at 10:59
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    $\begingroup$ Have you taken a look at [mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/3190/…, [mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1542/…, [mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/3926/…? My guess is that the size of the file is dictated by the JPEG. Have you tried compressing the JPEG that you export? $\endgroup$
    – tkott
    Oct 10, 2012 at 14:01
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    $\begingroup$ @Mammouth I'm not quite sure why you believe the raster images aren't compressed, but they most certainly are. If you look in the file you can clearly see the /FlateDecode filter applied to the image stream. This is a lossless compression method so it does not achieve as high a compression ratio as a lossy method (like JPEG). $\endgroup$
    – ragfield
    Oct 10, 2012 at 14:45
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    $\begingroup$ @ragfield: fair enough. But how do I tell Mathematica to use jpeg ? $\endgroup$
    – Mammouth
    Oct 11, 2012 at 19:21

1 Answer 1

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Try using EPS as export format (e.g. Export["filename.eps", img], then converting the resulting file to PDF with epstopdf or ps2pdf. This produces much better results than Mathematica's PDF export in most cases.

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  • $\begingroup$ Doesn't solve all problems. $\endgroup$
    – alancalvitti
    Feb 5, 2013 at 0:08

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