Re: Replace `-dgs-load-fonts' to `--bigpdfs' in lilypond-book (issue 300280043 by address@hidden)

[dak]

On 2016/06/11 08:40:12, trueroad wrote:
> Remove `-dgs-load-fonts' in lilypond-book

The problem I have with that behavior is the ridiculous amount of disk
space it consumes.  I believe we use this for building the LilyPond docs
already, and I need about 4GB of free disk space to run a build with
docs right now.  4GB.  Several small snippets chip in with 20MB of size.

So the combination of embedding all fonts and apparently not subsetting
them is causing very large disk space requirements.  I don't think this
is a long-term feasible solution and I would not be surprised if a lot
of automatically running package builders would abort building LilyPond
because of suspiciously high memory requirements.

So the question is whether we can get gs-load-fonts and/or font
subsetting working in a manner where the end product does not contain
multiple font copies.

One option I could imagine would be writing a multipage PS file getting
converted into a multipage PDF file which gets included once and then
just has the individual objects referenced as they occur.  In that case,
we would no longer be working with the "database" approach, meaning that
the special case of multiple translations of documents containing a
large amount of repeated snippets would result in quite more LilyPond
work, but quite less Ghostscript work.  That would be a net loss of
performance but offset by making things considerably simpler
conceptually.

Another option is working subsetting of fonts such that they _will_
combine properly.  I mean, other people manage, don't they?

https://codereview.appspot.com/300280043/