[pdftex] Incredibly PDF filesize difference by pdflatex compared to ps2pdf

[Hans Hagen]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>The reason to omit subroutines is that if you only need a subset of a
>font, you only need the subroutines used by the glyph descriptions you
>need.  dvips solved the problem by replacing the content of an unused
>subroutine by a "return" statement.  This is less efficient than to
>renumber all needed subroutines and their calls but quite secure.
>
>pdftex does not modify subroutines, it just includes all of them up to
>the one with the highest number and omits the rest.  I'm not 100%
>sure, so I'm still interested in the output of dvips.  AFAIK dvips and
>pdftex share the same source code but behave slightly different.
>  
>
if i remember right there have been some problem in that area in the 
past (sometime around acrobat 4->5); these were fixed by Tom Kacvinski  
who probably know best why dvips/pdftex differs in that aera

>All subroutines containing hints are ignored.  IMHO, this is not a
>good idea.  The fonts processed by pdftex contain all the information
>the font designer put into them, the fonts processed by ps2pdf are of
>much lower quality.
>  
>
Then, what happens when gs converts pdf into pdf? Is this configurable?

>The fonts you use are amazingly funny in this respect.
>  
>
nice analysis -)

>This is an infinitesimal small excerpt of the subroutine array of
>MinionPro-It:
>
>dup 149 {
>	hhcurveto
>	} |
>dup 150 {
>	hhcurveto
>	} |
>dup 151 {
>	hhcurveto
>	} |
>dup 152 {
>	hhcurveto
>	} |
>dup 153 {
>	hhcurveto
>	} |
>dup 154 {
>	hhcurveto
>	} |
>
>
>I doubt that is useful to have subroutines which contain a single
>token, but it absolutely doesn't make sense to have two subroutines
>with the same content.
>  
>
are these routines normally created by the font design program (i.e. 
some strange buggy optimzation?)

>But the font you use has 2111 subroutines which only contain the token
>"hhcurveto".  Yes, twothousandonehundredeleven!  A single one would be
>sufficient.  And even this doesn't make much sense.
>  
>
so, maybe we need a font fixer

Hans 


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