Hi Herbie (and users of PDF with bitmaps),


     I have posted  at

   <http://lcs98.free.fr/study/>

the file "study.pdf" that you recently announced on

        Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:13:31 +0100.

and backchannelled to me. It seems you created it with
the 8.2 version of Adobe Acrobat using the corresponding
"Image Conversion Plugin". The PDF version is 1.6.

Your "study.pdf" has exactly the efficiency of TIF-G4
(the fax group 4 variant of TIF). But the packaging of
it is certainly not exactly the most common, since a
program "PDF2TIFF" that I once bought extracts nothing
from it. Maybe a new variant of TIF-G4 is involved. At
any rate, the slow 20 sec embedding speed you mention is
a sure sign that Distiller _repackaged_ my TIF files in
creating your PDF; indeed, certain other means of
embedding such as "c42pdf" are nearly instantaneous.
Have you any further explanation of all this?

I extracted the bitmap files using Open Office (by the
recipe I have posted); and then I verified that they
are bit-for-bit exactly the original "study" bitmaps.
Thus, for the embedding of TIFF-G4 bilevel bitmaps,
Distiller has caught up with the competition.

But what about _extraction_ by Distiller/Acrobat of
bilevel bitmaps from PDF. In particular, is your
Distiller Pro 8.2 able to extract the bitmaps from
"study.pdf"? Also I wonder whether you harvest them as
TIFF_G4s?

In the extraction procedure of Open Office, there is a
loss of page order; restoring it is a real pain, indeed
a forbidding task if there are hundreds or thousands of
pages.  (FileJuicer is OK here!)

Finally I was surprised to hear that Adobe is again
offering academic discounts; what percentage can one
expect?

Cheers,

Laurent S.