Re: Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.22 Release Candidate 1

[David Kastrup]

Ken Sharp <address@hidden> writes:

> At 00:31 19/09/2017 +0900, Masamichi Hosoda wrote:
>
>>When you create a PDF document using something like a TeX system
>>you may include many small PDF files in the main PDF file.
>>It is common for each of the small PDF files to use the same fonts.
>>
>>If the small PDF files contain embedded full font sets,
>>the TeX system includes all of them in the main PDF.
>>The main PDF contains duplicates of the same full sets of fonts.
>>Therefore, `PDFDontUseFontObjectNum` can remove the duplicates.
>>This may considerably reduce the main PDF-file's size.
>
> And if you have multiple subsets, badly named (eg OpenOffice output)
> then you get a final PDF file where some of the text is missing or
> garbled.

So?  Nobody forces anybody to use that option.

>>LilyPond has option `--bigpdfs` for unifying duplicate fonts in this
>>method.
>
> And your point is what ?

That we are talking about functionality that is considered useful?

> That's not what the pdfwrite device is intended for, and we don't
> claim you can use it to do that.
>
> As I said, if you think its that useful, then you can add the switch
> back in. In fact, provided you don't change SubsetFonts, the resulting
> file may well be smaller anyway, since the pdfwrite device will only
> embed that portion of each font (which you say is a complete
> duplicate) so the resulting two fonts will be smaller than the
> original two fonts.
>
> Risking incorrect output for the minimal benefit of a slightly smaller
> file seems unwise to me.

I think "slightly smaller" was something like a factor of 10.  We are
talking about files including literally thousands if not ten thousands
of graphics (manuals close to a thousand pages with lots of graphic
output included).

-- 
David Kastrup