Re: [Mostly Solved] Re: Blurry fonts in printed invoices
On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 23:51:32 -0400, Celejar wrote:
[...]
> I've been printing from IW using the virtual CUPS-PDF printer. I just
> tried printing to file (direct to PDF, not to ps), and I now get the
> same pdffonts output that you do, nice font names but all 'no's in the
> sub column.
Ah, so that is the difference: The cups-pdf virtual printer probably
uses ghostscript directly, including its "ugly" font naming scheme,
while the print-to-file function of iceweasel seems to work via
libcairo, resulting in nicer names but wasteful embedding of whole
character sets.
> OTOH, I find that the file sizes are 10 - 20 percent
> *smaller* for pages printed directly to file from IW! I have tried
> three different pages: a blog post, a sales invoice and an AP news
> article.
Hmm, maybe cups-pdf works like more a printer driver, embedding
character subsets for each page separately, which could lead to a
certain amount of wasteful overlap. I would then expect to see a
different name for the same font on different pages, though.
Another possible explanation is that libcairo uses a better compression
algorithm for the embedded font data, or that the size of the "full"
character set of a given font varies with the encoding.
> Your test page, OTOH, is about 4 to 5 times *larger* when
> printed directly to file. Perhaps the reason is that your page uses
> relatively few characters per font, while more typical pages tend to
> use much larger subsets, which limits the savings realized by only
> including subsets of the fonts in the file?
Yes, indeed, that might also explain why the print-to-file function does
not bother to figure out the minimum necessary character subset to
embed: It does not matter all that much unless somebody puts up a font
test page with many different fonts and only a few characters for each
individual font.
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
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