Re: Missing items to make Cairo ready

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

On Thu, 2023-01-05 at 13:24 +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > 
> > IMO, working with a 35mb user manual isn't materially different
> > from working with a 10mb user manual.  Both take a while to
> > download.
> 
> Indeed, but the manuals as a whole, in all languages, get also
> distributed, and there it *does* make a significant difference IMHO:
> Right now, the PDFs in `lilypond-2.24.0-documentation.tar.xz` (which
> has a size of 170MByte) need 144MByte in total (uncompressed).
> Multiply the latter by four...

Let's look at some concrete and objective numbers here instead of just
extrapolating - notation.pdf and also collated-files.pdf with all
regression tests are kind of the worst case scenario for the inclusion
of many tiny PDFs and font subsetting.

When building with gs-9.55.0 and extractpdfmark, notation.pdf and
collated-files.pdf are 6.3MB and 4.9MB. With the Cairo backend
(admittedly post-processed with gs-10.0.0; will have to re-run with the
older gs version tomorrow), this increases to 14MB and 17MB - a factor
2.2x and 3.5x.
For the totality of the (uncompressed) out-www/offline-root, this means
an increase from 825MB to 898MB; when tar'ing only this directory with
xz, the size grows from 130MB to 179MB. (Please keep in mind that our
documentation tarball contains more than that, and is also built in a
different environment, so numbers may and will vary).

Is this increase measurable? Yes. Is it acceptable? I don't know, but
simply pointing out that it has been worse before the introduction of
extractpdfmark is not a really convincing argument IMHO.

What I find worrying in this discussion is that proponents of having
Cairo sooner than later keep dismissing the size argument, in parts
with very strong words, without the willingness to look into it (as far
as I understand; or have there been concrete attempts before I raised
the point only yesterday?). In my humble opinion, this is not a good
attitude for planning and proposing large-scale changes as we are
discussing them...

Jonas

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