Re: Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.22 Release Candidate 1

[David Kastrup]

Knut Petersen <address@hidden> writes:

>>> If other people agree that my
>> <https://codereview.appspot.com/325630043/>patch solves the problem
>> of exorbitant file sizes, we might live well without ghostscripts
>> PDFDontUseFontObjectNum.
>>
>> I'm not really clear on how this works, I'm curious as to where the
>> final embedded fonts are inserted. However, if it does work it would
>> be a good thing from my point of view. 
>
> It's amazing to see how putative minor changes affect pdf file sizes:
> The total size of the pdfs of our documentation (11108 pages in 47
> pdfs) varies between 96MB and 306MB dependent on some minor changes in
> the our code and the ghostscript version used.

That sounds worse than it is once you realize that those 47 pdf are in
something like 10 different languages, so people are going to use only a
subset of those anyway.

> The good news: The winning solution (96MB)
>
>  * is possible without PDFDontUseFontObjectNum
>  * is possible with HEAD of git master of ghostscript.

What's the tree size for "make doc"?  How does it deal with older
versions of Ghostscript?

At any rate: is there any reason for us to actually use glyphshow at all
considering its apparent drawbacks?  Or is it intended more for things
that should be treated like glyphs but are produced on-the-fly?  Like
beams and stems and such: we do those using graphical commands right now
but that does not allow for things like hinting.

-- 
David Kastrup