Is a 500K resume too big?

[chemistry_geek]

I wrote my CV/resume in NeoOffice and printed it to PDF - 4 pages long including references. The Open Office/NeoOffice .swx file is 16KB and the .PDF file is 124KB. The CV is all text (Times New Roman mostly @ 10 point, but some text is 12 point and bolded), absolutely no graphics.

[Perseus]

Why would simple text in Illustrator create such a large file then? I was using two fonts and no graphics, yet I get 500K. Woooaah!!!

[Lt Major Burns]

because illustrator has never been web-based, and has never had to keep file sizes down. it has virtually no compression in it. i'm not toally sure why it;s so big, but they always are.

[billbaloney]

I just tried an experiment and got an interesting result. I took a page of plain text in Illustrator and created a PDF by "Save As...", deselecting "Preserve editing capabilities" and "Generate thumbnails". Then I created a PDF of the same page via the OS X Print dialog.

From previous experience with Illustrator, I was expecting that the Illustrator-produced PDF, available here, would be much bigger than the OS X native PDF, available here. In fact, it's the opposite -- at least for this example. The AI native PDF is 52 K, while the OS X-generated PDF is 384 K.