Hello everybody out there using R, When putting multiple plots with thousands of data points into a single PDF file, this file can get huge and take a long time to open. The following post describes exactly the same problem in Matplotlib, as well as a nice fix for it: Matplotlib: multipage PDF with rasterized plots Particularly nice about it is, that it only rasterizes the points without rasterizing the labels. http://www.astrobetter.com/blog/2014/01/17/slim-down-your-bloated-graphics/ contains a nice example of it. I am now looking for a similar solution in R. stackoverflow.com/questions/8048984/plot-as-bitmap-in-pdf?rq??=1 stackoverflow.com/questions/8048984/plot-as-bitmap-in-pdf and stackoverflow.com/questions/8048984/plot-as-bitmap-in-pdf all go in the right direction, but treat images which are already in raster format.