Is there a way to compress a pdf made with pdfkit? - ios

I’m using pdfkit to create multi-page documents with embedded images, and the files get really large quickly. I can compress them nicely afterwards using Preview on the Mac, and they still look great, so I’m wondering if there is perhaps a setting I’m missing in pdfkit that controls resolution or size, or if there is way to compress them after creating them.

No, there isn't a way of specifying the image compression using PDFKit. It's just putting the image data in a PDF wrapper.
I'd suggest that you probably don't want to reduce the size of the image; but just the compression level. However, if you do, you can use CGPDFDocument and scale the image to fit a particular-sized graphic context.
On macOS, it is possible to create a Quartz Filter programmatically, which can include options for compression, which you can then apply in the options when you write your PDF; but this isn't available in iOS.
(If you're using macOS's 'Reduce File Size' Quartz Filter when exporting from Preview, it's well-known to be not very good; many people have made better ones.)
However, you can set the JPEG compression level in a UIImage object, so you may be able to increase the compression in the image data before you convert it to PDF.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiimage/1624115-jpegdata/

Related

Which program or format to use for texture compression

I have big image textures (4-12MB) and have resized them as much as I can without losing too much detail and would like to further compress them. Online compressors compress the 12.6MB image to 6MB without any problems, but Xcode doesn't support it (even though the compressed image is still .png), apparently because indexed color spaces are not supported for bitmap graphics contexts (according to CGBitmapContextCreate documentation and another post) and the compressed image uses them. If I try to use it I get an error:
CGBitmapContextCreate: unsupported color space.
I was looking through Apple documentation about compression and supported formats, but all I can find is information about how to compress images in code. I want to be able to apply an compressed (or otherwise reduced in size) image in the editor itself and not later in code. Is this possible?
If it is not possible to do this using a program, how should this be done via code in Swift? I found a lot of objective-C posts about this, but none that uses Swift.
Important: iOS does not support device-independent or generic color spaces. iOS applications must use device color spaces instead.
Use CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB as the color space.

SVGKit performance and should it be preferred over PNG?

I have been looking at SVGKit and I am finding conflicting ideas. Some say it's slower than PNG and others saying it is fast.
I was hoping to get a recommendation and which route I should take. When I am exporting my vector graphics to PNG for display, would it not make sense to use an SVG instead ?
Of course this gives the added value that it remains a vector.
Or is it still recommended in exporting everything to a PNG ?
You might consider the middle-way introduced in Xcode 7. Here you add your assets to the project as vector images (PDF) and at build-time Xcode automatically generates the PNGs in all needed sizes (1x, 2x, 3x).
Personally, I only use SVGs when necessary, like if I need to be able to change the color of the (parts of the) image. I believe there can be a performance hit when resizing vector images at run-time, although Android uses vectors as default, so it might be insignificant.
SVG is most resource intensive and can be used if you need to display something that can be zoomed in and out while PNG should be preferred for most UI graphics (logos, icons, etc.), as it is crisp yet remains lightweight and fast to display so there is no way to compare SVG with PNG in term of Performance.
if you are going after a Crystal clear images you can use pdf based graphics, which are supported by Xcode Using Vector Images in Xcode
if you still need to implement SVGKit i always suggest using some tools (like SVGCleaner) to clean and simplify SVG in order to enhance performance.

What are the ways to reduce bundle size on iOS?

I have some images which are huge in size and my bundle size currently is 70 MB. I think Xcode already runs the assets through png crush.
Do not use any text images with useless effects, use UILabels instead.
Draw simple shapes and effects using CAShapeLayers instead of using
images.
Use JPEGs instead of PNGs where you don't need transparency.
(Actually file size depends on the image content here)
Use Save for Web option in PhotoShop or other tools to optimize PNG
images.
Use sprites combined together instead of separate images.
Make sure you delete all unused resources.
Do not localize common parts of the images, localize only the
different parts. (think of a background image with a small flag at
the bottom for each locale. use one single bg image and separate flag
images. localize flag images only, not the entire bg images with the
flags.)
Use the same splash images for iOS7 and previous iOS versions. (You
need to manually edit the JSON file in .xcassets)
Try using a CDN to download assets on the first launch.
In addition to images keep those in mind too:
Try replacing custom fonts with default system fonts if you don't
need them really.
Use MP3 audio files instead of WAV files. (or other
compressed formats)
Make sure you delete all unused 3rd party frameworks.
You can try converting the images to jpg (if they don't have any transparent regions).
Also try using http://imageoptim.com/
It seems very unlikely that you actually need huge images. After all, the screen is not huge. Thus, the most likely form of size reduction is to reduce the physical dimensions of the images to the size you are actually going to be displaying.
This saves bandwidth when the user downloads the image, reduces the size of the app on the user's hard disk (the device), and also saves memory at the time an image is loaded. It is a vast waste of RAM to load an image that is larger than the size at which it will be displayed; after all, remember, the memory involved rises exponentially with the square of the difference.
One option is to host the images on a CDN like OpenText and fetch them as part of app initialization, or whenever they are first needed. Obviously this is more coding, but projects like SDWebImage make it pretty easy:
https://github.com/rs/SDWebImage/tree/master/SDWebImage
It also gives you the flexibility to swap out those images later if you use caching headers.

Use icns file as an image in iOS

Is there a way to use an icns file as the image source for I guess a UIImage? Or pick out one of the representations and resize?
NSImage does not seem to be available in cocoa-touch.
In particular I'd like to use them for drawing in the imageView part of a UITableViewCell.
There is no built-in way to do this and I see little benefit in doing so. It's best to just use the sizes that you need and ship them as individual images in your app. If you want to draw the images in a UITableViewCell, performance is an important aspect and resizing images won't be fast.
If you really need images in many different sizes and really don't want the best performance by including images for each size, you could use a PDF to make use of vector graphics. There is a nice article about this technique: http://mattgemmell.com/2012/02/10/using-pdf-images-in-ios-apps/
Honestly, don't try to use .icns files in your iOS app. It's just a container for images of different sizes and resizing is not a good idea, anyway. Either include individual images for any size you need or use vector graphics using a PDF file.

How can I get ColdFusion to scale images of any type?

Server Config:
Windows Server 2003
IIS 6
ColdFusion 8 Standard Edition
Java Version 6 Update 18
I have a ColdFusion application that allows users to upload images that will be added to an existing PDF. When the images are added to the PDF, they have to fit within a minimum/maximum height and width, so the uploaded image needs to be scaled to fit.
For instance, let's say the minimum height and width for a given image is 100x100, and the maximum height and width is 200x200, and the user uploads an image that is 500x1000. I use the logic below to scale that image down without skewing the image (it keeps its original shape) to 100x200. For an image smaller than the minimum, it is scaled up (in the example above, a 50x50 image would be scaled up to 100x100).
Unfortunately, I'm running into a lot of problems with users uploading "invalid images". I know that ColdFusion has problems working with Progressive JPEGs and CMYK JPEGs, but even some TIFFs are throwing errors. Also, a 3MB TIFF image takes over a minute to scale (not to mention the loss of resolution that occurs, which I have submitted as a separate question here.)
I've added logic to prevent ColdFusion from trying to process an "invalid image" by using the IsImageFile() function, but the users are very frustrated when they have an image that they can open and view on their PC, but we can't accept it. Do online print companies (i.e. Shutterfly, Kodak, etc.) have these issues? I can't remember ever having an issue on these websites (though I know they may not necessarily use ColdFusion).
Any thoughts on what I can do to allow more types of images to be used (Progressive, CMYK, etc.) and improve performance?
You will likely have to use a non-CF solution like we had to do before CF8. Some libraries mentioned here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/158756/what-is-the-best-image-manipulation-library
Scaling time is heavily dependent on the algorithm you chose to use. Adding images to PDFs in ColdFusion is unpredictable at best. I found them to be often inflated, dramatically increasing the PDF file size.
Here is some information from the docs:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=functions_in-k_16.html
Supported image file formats
The cfimage tag operates on a number of different file formats. To list the formats that are supported on the server where the ColdFusion application is deployed, use the GetReadableImageFormats function and the GetWriteableImageFormats function.
ColdFusion supports the following default image formats on Macintosh, Windows, and Unix operating systems:
JPEG
GIF
TIFF
PNG
BMP
ColdFusion does not support the following image formats:
Animated GIF
Multipage TIFF
PSD
AI
CMYK support
The cfimage tag supports reading and writing CMYK images, but does not support actions that require converting the images. For example, you can use CMYK images with the read, write, writeToBrowser, resize, rotate, and info actions. You cannot use CMYK images with the convert, captcha, and border actions. The same rule applies to image functions. For example, the ImageNew, ImageRead, and ImageWrite functions support CMYK images, but the ImageAddBorder function does not.

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