Re: Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.22 Release Candidate 1

[Ken Sharp]

At 22:30 19/09/2017 +0200, Knut Petersen wrote:

> What happens if you include several  "final" pdfs in a *TeX document?
>
> If you include several pdfs generated as described above in a 
> *TeX-generated pdf, all fonts from the lilypond pdfs are included. 
> Probably all are different. If you  feed the  *TeX-pdf to ghostscript, 
> ghostscript sees different fonts (although all are constructed from 
> emmentaler glyphs). ghostscript never was able to merge those fonts, and 
> it probably never will be able.

Quite so. The use of glyphshow means that a font must be created. Each such 
font is effectively unique in its layout. It is technically possible to 
reconstruct a small number of fonts which include all the potential glyphs, 
and remap all the character codes in all the PDF files so that they use 
these fonts. In practice this is unfeasible.


> We include thousands of lilypond-pdfs in a TeX document

OK so Lilypond produces its PostScript in an entirely different (but better 
from a PostScript programmers point of view) way. This explains why I 
wasn't able to understand David's point, my prior exposure to Lilypond 
output didn't look like that.


I do have a notion of a way to solve this, using Ghostscript but without 
exploiting the old bug, but before I discuss it I'd like to test it 
further, with real Lilypond data. Just in case it turns out not to work 
with your files.

If someone can create a couple of PostScript files, ideally genuine 
examples of the files you would use for your manual, created as you would 
create them for the manual (ie with the bigpdf switch) then I can 
experiment a bit. I don't need any PDF files, just the PostScript you would 
send to Ghostscript to create a PDF file.

Oh, and I'd need whatever fonts you are using as well. I'm surprised you 
find it necessary to have different fonts for different point sizes though.



                        Ken