[XeTeX] duplicate embedded fonts

[Hendrik Fuß]

On 28/07/07, Axel E. Retif <axretif at igo.com.mx> wrote:
> > I'm using xetex and xdvipdfmx to typeset a document which imports
> > several PDF figures. The figures use the same fonts as the main
> > document, but since they all have their own font subsets embedded,
> > I end up with a PDF which has hundreds of subsets of the same font,
> > some of which have different encodings. I have heard that this can
> > cause problems with some reprographic setups, but apart from that,
> > I think the file size could be greatly reduced by removing these
> > fonts. Does anybody know a simple way to do this?
> >
> > I used Illustrator to create most of the figures, which seems to
> > always embed fonts in its PDF files.
>
> If you are on a Mac, you might want to try F. Costanzo and Gary
> Gray's TeX Font Outliner, part of their PDF Processing Apps:

Yes, I guess for the purpose of reprographic printing, outlining all
text would be acceptable.

However, outlined text generally isn't display well on screen, so for
producing screen readable PDFs this is not the optimal solution. I
think, professional desktop publishing applications probably get
around this problem by processing the included figures and then
producing a PDF from a single source, rather than pasting together
figures and body text, as pdftex and xetex do.

What I could probably do is somehow strip all fonts from the figure
PDFs, but then again it's not guaranteed that all the glyphs I need
will actually be embedded in the final PDF. In order to fully address
this issue, xetex would have to actually parse my PDF figures and
consolidate the fonts I've used to embed each font only once.

I don't know whether that's something that is desirable to include in
the TeX program (or in a dependent, external tool). I also don't know
whether that's a straightforward thing to implement or not. Maybe
there's a simpler solution.

Anyway, thanks for your help. Let me know if you have any more suggestions.

cheers,
Hendrik