[luatex] LuaTeX file almost 2.5x bigger

[Hans Hagen]

On 26-7-2010 10:58, Pablo Rodríguez wrote:

> Sorry, but I'm afraid I don't get your point here (sorry if I
> misunderstood your comment).

font expansion can be tuned in several ways:

- the number of steps
- factors per glyph

the first one is not that relevant as in the current expansion machinery 
each 'line' gets an expansion factor that gets applied to all glyphs in 
that line

however, if you assign different ef codes to glyphs it might be that 
within a line there are many changes in horizontal scaling

now, in pdftex, pseudo fonts are uses, so there many steps lead to many 
font instances being included, while in luatex the font is included once 
and transform matrices are injected ... the trade off is hard to 
predict, but when it was introduced we did experiments that actually 
gave smaller files so it all depends on the circumstances

there are a couple of other approaches to hz like optimization but 
that's beyond this thread

in luatex we try to keep things clean and simple and the current 
approach qualifies as such; of course we can try to minimize a couple of 
side effects (for instance of scaling) when they don't interfere with 
what you get on paper, so future versions might produce smaller files; 
but it's not a priority

Hans

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