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hahaha.. Very interesting points, conveyed with humor but have a strong base in CS fundamentals. I guess my original question was not very well framed. I am wri

hahaha.. Very interesting points, conveyed with humor but have a strong base in CS fundamentals. I guess my original question was not very well framed. I am writing a CS conference paper (on the ACM SIG template) and four pages in docx is 90 KB and the same saved as PDF came to 260 KB. I was so far using a much older version of Word and only recently upgraded to Word 2010. Hence, my older pdfs used to be converted via a free utility and for the first time used the Word 2010 pdf converter. I loved your analogy in political speeches. I actually have a friend who tracks politician (on www.mumbaivotes.com) - I might actually share this idea of your of compressing political speeches to identify the uniqueness in what is said in the speech ;-)

lutusp 14y ago
Oh -- I forgot to ask an important question: what happens when you compress the PDF? If you can compress the PDF so it more closely equals the word document in size, the practical difference between them sort of evaporates, at least as to storage size. To me the advantage of a PDF over a Word document is that the former is now open-source. And it is universally regarded as the "correct" format for technical writing. > ... I might actually share this idea of your of compressing political speeches to identify the uniqueness in what is said in the speech ;-) The intriguing part is that it's an objective measure, in a field that's called "political science" but isn't remotely scientific. I'd like to see a thorough study comparing political speeches in this easily conducted, almost automatic way. Another, perhaps more difficult, study would analyze advertising copy for use of words that have no objective meaning, words that appeal only to emotion. My favorite advertising word is "zesty", a frequently-used word with no information content whatever.

lutusp 14y ago

Oh -- I forgot to ask an important question: what happens when you compress the PDF? If you can compress the PDF so it more closely equals the word document in size, the practical difference between them sort of evaporates, at least as to storage size. To me the advantage of a PDF over a Word document is that the former is now open-source. And it is universally regarded as the "correct" format for technical writing. > ... I might actually share this idea of your of compressing political speeches to identify the uniqueness in what is said in the speech ;-) The intriguing part is that it's an objective measure, in a field that's called "political science" but isn't remotely scientific. I'd like to see a thorough study comparing political speeches in this easily conducted, almost automatic way. Another, perhaps more difficult, study would analyze advertising copy for use of words that have no objective meaning, words that appeal only to emotion. My favorite advertising word is "zesty", a frequently-used word with no information content whatever.