Question

I wanted to add a PDF generation button for articles. Everything is working well until I noticed that the file sizes are upwards of 4MB for a document with 200KB of JPG images and about 120KB of HTML. So, I tossed the CFDocument into the CFPDF tag which reduced it to 1.5MB. Better. Then I put it through Acrobat’s web optimizer which took it down to 335KB. I cannot find an “optimizing” solution with either CFDocument or CFPDF. I was hoping for a quality setting or something. I should also note that CFDocument takes a while to process (relatively speaking). Since ColdFusion 9 added an optimize function, I’m guessing that I’m out of luck until this server is upgraded. True?

<cfdocument format="pdf" 
            localurl=true 
            name="loc.tempPDF">

    <cfoutput>#loc.articleContent#</cfoutput>

</cfdocument>

<cfpdf action = "write" 
       destination = "#expandPath('\pdf\temp.pdf')#" 
       source = "loc.tempPDF"  
       overwrite = "yes" 
       saveOption = "linear" />

Answer 1

That’s correct, there is currently no way to optimize PDFs in ColdFusion 8 with the native cfdocument or cfpdf tags. If you absolutely have to make this happen without upgrading to CF9 (which has much improved PDF compression), then you could look at the iText library for generating PDFs via Java.