Here’s the link to the book’s new PDF I exported this morning, including a number of repaired typos and other fixed minor glitches:
http://www.contrapositivediary.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf
There’s a weirdness here that I still don’t fully understand. If anybody out there can explain this to me, I would be tremendously thankful.
Ok. The release of 10-21-2025 was 20.2 MB in size. The release before that, from 9-13-2025, was 5.7 MB. I was in a rush to get the 10-21 release uploaded, and didn’t stop to look at file sizes. My bad. I live a fullish life and sometimes I move too fast.
I don’t claim to be an expert on PDF internals, so I did some digging around in the document properties for the 10-21 PDF. In the Document Properties there’s a button to bring up something called “Audit Space Usage.” This lists all the various components of a PDF, including images, fonts, and so on, with percentages of the file taken up by each component. The “Structure Info” component took up 70% of the PDF. I didn’t find anything useful about the Structure Info component online, and don’t really understand what it refers to or how it got into the PDF. The PDF I exported this morning has zero space in the Structure Info line.
It has nothing to do with it being a tagged or untagged PDF. (I tested that. Tagging adds a little bulk—just not 300%!) In truth I still don’t know why the 10-21-2025 issue is so huge. Some switch somewhere must turn on Structure Info, but I haven’t found that switch yet, and must have hit it accidentally before I exported the 10-21 PDF.
Many thanks to reader Robert Riebisch for alerting me to the oversize file!
I also note that neither document seems to have internal cross-reference links. For example, many documents have the capability to click on a page number on the Table of Contents to jump straight to that page. That doesn’t work for me in either document, although the page number for the first item in the Table of Contents (i.e. Introduction) formats the page number [7] as though it’s a link. The other page numbers in the ToC have a standard text format, rather than a link format.
If it’s an option, I’m sure the document would benefit from the inclusion of cross-reference links.