You could use pdfTeX:

echo '\shipout\hbox{}\end' | pdftex 

which produces a blank single-page texput.pdf of about 900 bytes, half of what ImageMagick uses.

This puts you at the mercy of the paper size default of your TeX installation, though. To set the size explicitly you can go to LaTeX instead:

echo '\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}\usepackage[pass]{geometry} \begin{document}\shipout\hbox{}\end{document}' | pdflatex 

You could use pdfTeX:

echo '\shipout\hbox{}\end' | pdftex 

which produces a blank single-page texput.pdf of about 900 bytes, half of what ImageMagick uses.

This puts you at the mercy of the paper size default of your TeX installation, though. To set the size explicitly you can go to LaTeX instead:

echo '\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}\usepackage[pass]{geometry} \begin{document}\shipout\hbox{}\end{document}' | pdflatex 

Yet another option would be to use Ghostscript's PDF driver, though the handy ps2pdf script:

echo showpage | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=letter - blank.pdf 

which is much quieter than TeX but produces less compact output (about 2300 bytes).