Re: Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.22 Release Candidate 1

[Ken Sharp]

At 00:41 22/09/2017 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:


> > Or, even so, should we take other methods (e.g. using non-embedded PDFs)?
>
> If we figure out a working alternative, we should take it.  The current
> set of Ghostscript bugs in 9.22 is still a bit in flux, so it's not
> clear yet which alternative actually could work.
>
> Is that a reasonable summary of the current state, Ken?

I'd say so, yes. I can't think of a reasonable alternative right at the 
moment, which will yield the same or at least similar output file size. 
Especially given the time scale of our ongoing release. The only other 
approach I could think of didn't work. If someone has other ideas I'll be 
happy to try them out or at least think them over.

As I said in my reply (sorry I saw Masamichi's mail first and replied to it 
first), *if* the fonts were fully embedded which, from a first glance they 
should be, then you wouldn't need this trickery. You could just use MuPDF 
to remove the duplicated FontFile objects, because they'd really be identical.

I've no idea why they aren't fully embedded but I'd have to guess its 
because they are CFF outlines, we don't see a lot of those. So it smells 
like a bug. I will look at it, as soon as I get some time, but its not 
likely to be a change we'll put into 9.22 given the state of the release 
cycle. In fact, realistically, its unlikely I'll even get the time to look 
at it before the release is complete.

So this is something that probably needs to be looked at after the release, 
preferably at leisure. Time pressure sort of makes this a lot worse.

More worrying is the fact that when I run the EPS files here with the 
current release candidate, I don't get one copy of Emmentaler-20 in the 
output PDF files, I get three. For me that didn't make any difference in 
the final output file, but it is a concern because I don't know why that 
would have changed.


                        Ken