[pdftex] How to get pdflatex to embed and subset ALL fonts?

[Jeffrey McArthur]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:54:00 +0100, you wrote:

>an easy way to update is to let'm add a cdrom drive, equip that with tex 
>live, and run from the cd

The system I am talking about is at LexisNexis. LexisNexis has some
"unusual" restrictions on software developers. One of the requirements was
that all the software had to be installed to their network. You could not
install an executable on a local drive. They even have people that routinely
go through all the offices and check each and every computer for executable
files. During the development of the system, that actually happened to us
once. The IT department found a PC where we had tested the software locally.
The IT department deleted it. This also caused the IT department to become
interested in what we were doing. I went into a meeting with the IT
department where they planned to "shut us down". Their IT guy was convinced
we were going to install tens of thousands of files on their server and that
was not acceptable. I told them that we planned on putting about 10 to 20
files on the server. That was all. I had a list of files we needed. About
have were required for our application and the other half for TeX. Instead
of the TDS, all the files were in a single directory. When you only have
about 10 files there is no real need for a complicated directory structure.

I know we would have lost the contract if we tried to either install the
full TeX installation on the local PC or put it on their network. (The IT
guys did not like us.)

I still have a copy somewhere of what I called "Tiny TeX". It was based on
the old emTeX version. All of the files fit on a 1.44 Meg floppy,
uncompressed, with actually a little room left over. You could run TeX, the
DVI viewer, and even print. Your choice of fonts was very restricted. But
you could actually run TeX from the floppy.

We usually use InstallShield to create our installs.  InstallShield has a
limitation of something like 65,000 files. (I remember a discussion about
that and FpTeX.) You have to jump through a lot of hoops to create a full
TeX installation on the PC using InstallShield. We don't go to the trouble.
We only put the files we need in the install.

We recently created a "Demo CD" that had four separate TeX installations on
it. We used PDFTeX. We took four of our applications and put them onto one
CD. Rather than figure out how to reconfigure all the applications to point
to a single TeX installation, it was easier to put all four on the CD. Each
installations was a little different because they had different fonts and
format files.

Like I said, we do things a little different. One of the things that has me
intrigued, but I have not got around to playing with is TeX for the
PocketPC. There is no way you could put an entire install there.