[pdftex] font inclusion

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Fri Apr 2 02:14:56 CEST 2010


Hi,
sometimes pdftex inserts a font twice with the same random prefix.  We
have a lot of font samples and test files in VnTeX and though they are
all created the same way, only very few of the created PDF files show
this behavior.  One of them is t5cyklop-test.pdf .

$ pdffonts t5cyklop-test.pdf 
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
GFOBEK+CMTT10                        Type 1            yes yes yes     10  0
HERLWI+Cyklop-Regular                Type 1            yes yes yes     11  0
QPKIYS+Cyklop-Italic                 Type 1            yes yes yes     12  0
HERLWI+Cyklop-Regular                Type 1            yes yes yes     13  0
QPKIYS+Cyklop-Italic                 Type 1            yes yes yes     14  0

BTW, the test files are under texmf-dist/source/generic/vntex/tests.
If you don't have the latest VnTeX release you'll find them under
texmf-dist/doc/generic/vntex/tests .  And be aware that the Makefile
won't work on Windows.

I don't know why only a few test files are affected.  No PDF browser
complained so far, so I assume that they contain valid PDF code.

I encountered this problem when I tried to reduce the size of the
files at http://vntex.sf.net/fonts/samples in order to reduce download
time.  The program I used was written by Peter Szabo and is called
pdfsizeopt.  He held a talk about it it at EuroTeX-2009 in The Hague
and you'll find the preprint in TUGboat 30:3.

pdfsizeopt extracts Type1 fonts from a PDF file and passes them to
Ghostscript in order to convert them to CFF.  Finally the Type1 fonts
are replaced by CFF.  But Ghostscript crashes if it gets the same font
more than once.

Of course, the problem could be circumvented if pdfsizeopt avoids to
pass more than one font to Ghostscript at the same time.  But I don't
understand why pdftex sometimes inserts a font twice and whether it's
desired or a mistake.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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