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

[Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>]

Hi Thanh,

thanks a lot for the quick answer.

On Mit, 16 Mai 2007, Thanh Han The wrote:
> this is a feature/limitation/bug/<call-what-you-like> of
> pdftex: it doesn't remove unused Subs entries (this is very
> tricky and dangerous), but replaces them by a dummy one.

Ok, this is what was my idea, too, that unused subs are included. Didn't
know that they are replaced by empty stubs.

> lmr10 has a very large number of subroutines (~550), while
> cmr10 has only 3. Another factor is that t1 fonts are

Ok, that makes it clear where the difference comes from. I guess that
the ~550 empty stubs take up a considerable space.

> encrypted and hence they cannot be compressed effectively,
> so all these dummy entries didn't get much smaller after
> compression and therefore the result is a much larger size.

Any plans for changing this feature/limitation? 

OTOH I would say that it really doesn't hurt too badly as soon as we
consider real world problems. It is true that for one char documents
this is a bad thing, but as soon as there are a lot of characters
included, the difference should get less severe.

Again, thanks a lot

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>                    Università di Siena
Debian Developer <preining@debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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