MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Patent/Heavy graphics pdfs and Adobe PDF Optimizer

andrewscheinman · 12-24-2009, 09:18 PM

I bought a dr1000 a year ago to use to view US and international patent documents in .pdf format. And gave up almost immediately, because the page turns were slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwww. So slow it wasn't worth the pain.

Recently I picked up my dr1000 again and discovered that there have been a bunch of updates to the firmware, so I installed 1.7.1, and it helped quite a bit. Then somewhere somehow I ran one of those horribly slow to read .pdfs through Adobe Acrobat Pro 8's PDF Optimizer function (I am using the OS X version of Acrobat Pro), and the difference was enormous.

I've seen a few posts mentioning this optimizer function in passing, does anyone else have any experience with particular tuning of it? I've been doing a variety of controlled experiments using it to see if I can figure out what parameters are doing the most good, but I've not found any really obvious conclusions.

Then the other question is whether there's any freeware that does the same (or better) job. I tried pdfopt on ubuntu but that didn't seem to help; I am guessing the magic is more in processing down the huge graphics files, but I haven't played with anything like imagemagick to see what I can do. As I recall I can probably write an applescript to batch convert .pdfs with Acrobat Pro, but I'd be happier to use a unix-type utility if one's available.

If anyone wants to play, it's particularly interesting that PCT documents (http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en) seem to be much more optimized than do US documents. I haven't looked at all the various sources of patent .pdfs to see if one source is more optimized than another (e.g., google patents versus patentlens) ... I think they all get the documents from the USPTO so I don't know if there's likely to be much difference.

AOS

12-24-2009, 09:18 PM	#1
andrewscheinman Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2008 Device: e505, digital reader 1000s	Patent/Heavy graphics pdfs and Adobe PDF Optimizer I bought a dr1000 a year ago to use to view US and international patent documents in .pdf format. And gave up almost immediately, because the page turns were slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwww. So slow it wasn't worth the pain. Recently I picked up my dr1000 again and discovered that there have been a bunch of updates to the firmware, so I installed 1.7.1, and it helped quite a bit. Then somewhere somehow I ran one of those horribly slow to read .pdfs through Adobe Acrobat Pro 8's PDF Optimizer function (I am using the OS X version of Acrobat Pro), and the difference was enormous. I've seen a few posts mentioning this optimizer function in passing, does anyone else have any experience with particular tuning of it? I've been doing a variety of controlled experiments using it to see if I can figure out what parameters are doing the most good, but I've not found any really obvious conclusions. Then the other question is whether there's any freeware that does the same (or better) job. I tried pdfopt on ubuntu but that didn't seem to help; I am guessing the magic is more in processing down the huge graphics files, but I haven't played with anything like imagemagick to see what I can do. As I recall I can probably write an applescript to batch convert .pdfs with Acrobat Pro, but I'd be happier to use a unix-type utility if one's available. If anyone wants to play, it's particularly interesting that PCT documents (http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en) seem to be much more optimized than do US documents. I haven't looked at all the various sources of patent .pdfs to see if one source is more optimized than another (e.g., google patents versus patentlens) ... I think they all get the documents from the USPTO so I don't know if there's likely to be much difference. AOS