[Rd] vignettes: problems with PDF compaction

[Henrik Bengtsson]

It's certainly not obvious, but you should use 'gswin32c.exe' instead
of 'gswin32.exe'.  From
http://ghostscript.com/doc/current/Install.htm#Install_Windows

"GSWIN32C.EXE  Ghostscript as a 32-bit Windows command line program.
This is usually the preferred executable.
GSWIN32.EXE 32-bit Ghostscript using its own window for commands"

Basically, 'gswin32c.exe' corresponds to 'gs' on Unix systems (the
other one tries to open its own Windows which doesn't work).  If
you're installing the 64-bit version of Ghostscript, use
'gswin64c.exe'.

You can verify that you have the proper setup by:

> Sys.setenv(R_GSCMD="C:/Program Files/gs/gs9.07/bin/gswin32c.exe")
> res <- system2(Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD"), args="--version")
9.07
> res
[1] 0

If you get 127 it indicates an error/command not found, e.g.

> Sys.setenv(R_GSCMD="C:/Program Files/gs/gs9.07/bin/gswin32c.exeHIDE")
> res <- system2(Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD"), args="--version")
> res
[1] 127

So, after confirming that you get res == 0, then retry with:

> tools::compactPDF("HE-examples.pdf", gs_quality="ebook")

FYI, you can set your R_GSCMD in C:/Users/foo/.Renviron, cf. help(".Renviron").

Hope this helps

Henrik

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Uwe Ligges
<ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
>
>
> On 22.04.2013 17:59, Michael Friendly wrote:
>>
>> On 4/21/2013 1:28 PM, Michael Friendly wrote:
>>>
>>> [Env: OS: Win Xp; R 2.15.2; IDE: eclipse/StatET]
>>>
>>> Each time I update my heplots package, I get warnings from R CMD check
>>> on R-Forge,
>>>
>>> * checking sizes of PDF files under ‘inst/doc’ ... WARNING
>>>    ‘gs+qpdf’ made some significant size reductions:
>>>       compacted ‘HE-examples.pdf’ from 739Kb to 366Kb
>>>
>> To follow up my own post, I did some more checking of whether/how to
>> compact PDFs on my own system.  My conclusion is that that I am unable
>> to comply with the request from CRAN maintainers, even though I would
>> like to.  Once again, I wonder why this cannot be handled on the CRAN
>> side automatically.
>
>
> Because we cannot know if the result is acceptable. This is not a lossless
> compression.
>
>
>
>
>> qpdf: running it from a cmd prompt (using the options from
>> tools::compactPDF) doesn't do very much compression
>>
>> C:\R\test>qpdf --stream-data=compress --object-streams=generate
>> HE-examples.pdf
>> HE-examples-comp.pdf
>>
>> C:\R\test>dir HE-examples*
>> 04/22/2013  10:55 AM           699,191 HE-examples-comp.pdf
>> 04/22/2013  10:28 AM           756,624 HE-examples.pdf
>>
>> gs:  I have gs installed at C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.07\bin\gswin32.exe,
>> but the gs installer doesn't put itself on the path, so
>> tools::compactPDF sees gs_cmd as empty:
>>
>>  > gs_cmd = Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD", "")
>> [1] ""
>>
>> so it can't run gs+qpdf.  OK, so I try to do it manually:
>>
>>  > Sys.setenv(R_GSCMD = "C:/Program Files/gs/gs9.07/bin/gswin32.exe")
>>  > setwd("test")
>>  >
>>  > tools::compactPDF("HE-examples.pdf")
>>  > tools::compactPDF("HE-examples.pdf", gs_quality="ebook")
>>
>> But this doesn't do anything, not even changing the timestamp on the
>> file, because the file size doesn't change enough.
>
>
> Either you changed it or not, there is no "not enough".
>
> Best,
> Uwe
>
>
>
>
>> C:\R\test>dir HE-examples.pdf
>> 04/22/2013  10:28 AM           756,624 HE-examples.pdf
>>
>
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