How to optimize pdf with many links and simple pages

Question

So... I can play tic-tac-toe (naughts and crosses) in a pdf: each board configuration is one page, and each cell of the board is a link which goes to the page corresponding to playing that move. The resulting pdf file contains 6046 pages and is 3MB large. My pdf viewer is a bit slow to display it.

What are ways I could reduce the size of such a pdf, which has a large number of simple pages and about 50000 links? I am also interested in ways to speed up compilation.

(To produce the pdf, run pdflatex on the following.)

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[paperwidth=48pt,paperheight=48pt,margin=0pt]{geometry}
\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
\newcount\0 \newcount\1 \newcount\2
\newcount\3 \newcount\4 \newcount\5
\newcount\6 \newcount\7 \newcount\8
\newcount\p
\def\here{\the\numexpr\0+3*(\1+3*(\2+3*(\3+3*(\4+3*(\5+3*(\6+3*(\7+3*\8)))))))}
\def\cell#1#2{\ifnum#1=\p\c#1\else\hyperlink{\here+\p*#2}{\c#1}\fi}
\def\c#1{\hbox to 14.5pt{\hfil\ifcase#1\or x\else o\fi\hfil}}
\def\|{\hskip-.2pt\vrule width.4pt\hskip-.2pt}%
\def\-{\noalign{\hrule height.4pt}}%
\def\mk#1{\p#1
  \hypertarget{\here}{%
    \hbox to 48pt{\hfil\vbox to 48pt{\vfil
        \everycr{}\tabskip 0pt\relax
        \halign{&\strut##\cr
          \cell\0  {1}\|&\cell\1   {3}\|&\cell\2   {9}\cr\-%
          \cell\3 {27}\|&\cell\4  {81}\|&\cell\5 {243}\cr\-%
          \cell\6{729}\|&\cell\7{2187}\|&\cell\8{6561}\cr}%
        \vfil}\hfil}}\newpage}
\begin{document}
\def\ter#1#2{#1=0 #2\relax #1=1 #2\relax #1=-1 #2\relax}
\ter\0{\ter\1{\ter\2{\ter\3{\ter\4{\ter\5{\ter\6{\ter\7{\ter\8{%
  \ifcase\numexpr\0+\1+\2+\3+\4+\5+\6+\7+\8\relax\mk{1}\or\mk{-1}\fi}}}}}}}}}
\end{document}

Answer 1

One way to get less pages would be if you eliminate all the ones with more than 1 row/column/diagonal of X's and O's, since you wouldn't reach those when you're properly playing tic tac toe.

Probably takes even longer to compile though.

Answer 2

I translated your tex-file to pdf by using pdflatex. I obtained a pdf-document of 6046 pages. This is the correct number of boards that contain an equal number of Os and Xes, plus the number of boards that contain one more X than Os ( because it is X that starts the game ). You may easily obtain the number 6046 by adding up products of the appropriate binomial coefficients. However, some of the hyperlinks are superfluous, because they would never be used in a real game. For example, page 3113 of the pdf shows a board with 3 Xes and 2 Os, like this : X X X \ - O - \ O - - ; a situation where X has won the game. Then this particular page should not contain any hyperlinks, because the game may be considered over. But page 3113 of the produced pdf-file still has 7 hyperlinks, as can easily be seen by clicking on each of the 9 boxes : 7 of the 9 possible clicks will send you to a different page. Hence, my conclusion is, that by improving the used algorithm, you may be able to reduce the number of hyperlinks and hence the size of the pdf-file. How to improve the algorithm would be a problem for further study.