I have downloaded two cairo generated PDF documents (http://cworth.org/~cworth/papers/cairo_ddc2005/cairo_ddc2005.pdf and http://cworth.org/~cworth/papers/cairo_lca2005/cairo_lca2005.pdf). Their original filesizes are 5.18MB and 3.08MB. Compressing them with the Flate algorithm (patent-free and with a higher compression rate for vectors than LZW), the resulting filesizes are 1.08MB and 678KB. I think the Flate compression should be enabled for all PDF generation with cairo. (I used http://multivalent.sf.net for the Flate compression, but remember that Multivalent tools are not released under the GNU GPL, unlike the tool itself.
Cairo 1.4.0 and later supports Flate compression in the generated PDF.
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