[pdftex] pdftex core dump when including certain pdf files

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-07-19 at 07:45:15 +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

 > > Werner, if file size matters
 > 
 > It's not only file size!  Accessing the disc for writing unnecessarily
 > large files is also time consuming.
 > 
 > Just in case I was unclear: The PDFs without fonts we would like to
 > generate (hopefully soon) are an intermediate step only; such PDFs are
 > not intended for actually being viewed but to speed up the creation of
 > a master PDF (with embedded fonts) that includes the font-less PDFs.
 > 
 > > it's certainly worthwhile to investigate what ghostscript can do for
 > > you.
 > 
 > I have no idea what you mean here, please elaborate.  Note that
 > ghostscript is *not* capable to merge various subsetted fonts back to
 > a single one: too much information is already lost during the
 > subsetting process.

I must admit that I never tried what you intend to do.  Thus I
suggested to investigate.

Did you try to merge different font subsets into one (subsetted fonts
already exist in the files) or did you try to convince Ghostscript to
insert missing fonts (PDF files contain only references to external
fonts e.g., /FontName, but no physical font, subsetted or not)?

In the latter case Ghostscript must be able to find the fonts.  So you
have to create your own Fontmap or to steal it (and the dedicated
fonts) from TeX Live and add the LilyPond fonts yourself.

  http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/tlgs

Please note that TL ships the original URW fonts maintained by Walter
Schmidt.  The fonts accompanied by Ghostscript are different and thus
not appropriate for subsitution.

The actual inclusion of fonts is done with

  ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress in.pdf out.pdf

Did you try this?  If you say

 > too much information is already lost during the subsetting process

I assume that your PDF files already contain font subsets.  But what I
have in mind is that you create PDF files which don't contain any
fonts at all but only the information which font (/FontName) should be
used.

Then Ghostscript can insert the fonts.  And it certainly creates
subsets by default.  AFAIK it even converts Type 1 fonts to CFF in
order to save space.  I don't know ATM what Ghostscript does if
multiple files are merged which all have references to one and the
same font but I'm confident that it does something very useful.

Isn't this exactly what you want to achieve?  Create zillions of files
which don't contain any fonts at all, merge them, and finally insert
the fonts in order to make the document portable?

I must admit that I don't know anything about LilyPond except that
musicians like it.  Presumably it creates PostScript code and converts
it to PDF.  Right?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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