Re: Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.22 Release Candidate 1

[Ken Sharp]

At 10:12 22/09/2017 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:


> Well, if we could delay the embedding, I'd not be particularly sad:
> "make doc" currently(?) eats up more than 3Gb which is sort of
> ridiculous.  The intermediate PDFs for lilypond-book are arranged in
> some "database" and not really externalized, so if they don't work on
> their own, this isn't a showstopper.

I guessed this was the case, and that's what I was aiming for, sadly it 
doesn't work.


> At any rate, any such strategy could not be implemented and tested in
> short time, so if in the mean time the font merging expedient would stay
> available for some time, it would make things a lot smoother for us.

Clearly it'll have to, whatever happens next. There simply isn't time to 
implement and test anything else. And I'd be very nervous about putting any 
changes into the release without a decent interval for bugs to emerge.


> We are not really striving for "optimum" rather than "better than awful"
> regarding the resulting file sizes.  This seems like being close enough.

Again I guessed this was probably the case, but its good to hear it for 
sure. As I said in reply to suzuki toshiya, if the font isn't being fully 
embedded I'd be inclined to regard that as a bug (slightly diffident as I 
don't even know *why* its not being fully embedded yet, there might be a 
good reason).

If the font(s) were fully embedded, then mutool could remove the duplicates 
from the final file. Caveat; the intermediate PDF files will be bigger, 
possibly a *lot* bigger. Currently the font streams are running at ~9KB, 
the full font is ~65KB uncompressed, lets say 30 KB compressed (CFF fonts 
don't compress well). So you're looking at each file growing by about 40KB. 
If the 3xfont embedding I see in 9.22 is real, then that becomes 100KB, 
maybe more if its one font per character.

I'm sorry to keep repeating but I do need to take a good chunk of time to 
look into this, which I don't have right now.

I need to see why the font isn't being fully embedded, and why 9.22 is 
apparently embedding multiple fonts when I'd only expect one. The text and 
font code is particularly difficult to debug and amend, so this is probably 
several weeks work.


                        Ken