Why the PDF produced by default is much larger than LaTeX or ConTeXt?

Questions
1

I see that PDF produced by Typst is quite large compared to equivalent LaTeX or ConTeXt PDF of same type i.e. 1.7. I know that I can use Ghostscript to optimize the size but I am just curious.

2

I guess it’s because of the accessibility info. You can try to disable it with the following CLI option.

--no-pdf-tags
By default, even when not producing a PDF/UA-1 document, a tagged PDF document is written to provide a baseline of accessibility. In some circumstances (for example when trying to reduce the size of a document) it can be desirable to disable tagged PDF

2 Likes
3

Additionally, Typst might produce more readable PDF, which comes at a cost of inserting more whitespace characters throughout. Ghostscript can probably fix this.