[pdftex] Reducing the number of font descriptors (was: Font subsetting with PDFs from InDesign?)

[Michael Chapman]

On Friday 11 July 2008 11:20 pm, Martin Schröder wrote:
> 2008/7/11 Thanh Han The <hanthethanh at gmail.com>:
> > for pdftex it's rather difficult. If you want to merge font
> > descriptors, you must:
> >
> > - make sure the encodings/charwidths/... are the same;
> > - decode page contents and parse them, and rename the font tags if
> > needed to avoid collision;
> > - maybe a few things more...
> >
> > since it's hard to get this right, it's very unlikely pdftex will
> > support this, since we want pdf inclusion to be stable.
>
> Agreed.
>
> I'm thinking about a stand alone application that can identify and
> merge identical fonts (same basefont, same fontdescriptor etc.).
> At least for pdffonts and Acrobat two fonts are equal only if the
> entries in /Resources -> /Font point to the same object.
>
> Best
>    Martin

Unless I have missed something, this is a recurrent topic (e.g. April 2005, 
August 2006) where for example multiple used of pdfpages produced massive 
files.
The pdftops ->- ps2pdfwr route solved that problem (but only for printing). 
Something that kept PDF as PDF (boolmarks, hyperlinks) would certaibly be 
good.

Michael