Bug#424404: PDF files are much larger with lmodern than with CM fonts

[Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.org>]

Package: lmodern
Version: 1.010x-3
Severity: wishlist

PDF files generated using lmodern are much larger than the ones
generated using CM (via aeguill). For instance, 260333 bytes with
CM, and 469516 bytes with LM, for the same quality! LM should be
improved to get file sizes comparable to CM.

The following script can be used to show the difference on simple
examples.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

# Comparison of the lengths of PDF files using CM fonts and LM fonts.

set -e

prefix="cmpfonts-$$"

getsize()
{
  pkg="$1"
  shift
  cat > ${prefix}.tex <<EOF
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{$pkg}

\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
$@
\end{document}
EOF
  pdflatex ${prefix}.tex > /dev/null
  stat -c %s ${prefix}.pdf
  rm ${prefix}.*
}

cm=$(getsize aeguill "$@")
lm=$(getsize lmodern "$@")
printf "%6d %6d %s\n" $cm $lm "$*"
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here are a few examples:

$ for i in A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q ACDE AL LP; ./cmp-cmlm $i
  3179  15922 A
  3609  21793 B
  3167  16484 C
  3155  15972 D
  3167  15592 E
  3168  20367 F
  3660  15756 G
  3214  15535 H
  3126  16303 I
  3150  21196 J
  3240  15580 K
  3128  22096 L
  3211  15497 M
  3175  15664 N
  3130  17331 O
  3159  21973 P
  3249   9658 Q
  3682  17016 ACDE
  3369  22358 AL
  3310  22385 LP

The first column gives the file sizes when using CM, the second column
gives the file sizes when using LM.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-686-bigmem (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages lmodern depends on:
ii  defoma                       0.11.10-0.1 Debian Font Manager -- automatic f
ii  tex-common                   1.7         Common infrastructure for using an
ii  xfonts-utils                 1:1.0.1-1   X Window System font utility progr

lmodern recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information