Re: [Freebangfont-devel] ps/pdf files with different fonts + bspeller

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Wednesday 27 November 2002 05:13 am, Taneem Ahmed wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Anirban Mitra wrote:
> > Postscript as well PDF files embed true type fonts in the document.

This is in general true, but embedding might not be happening in this case. 
I'm not totally sure, but I think one can check this in a PDF file by trying 
to select a piece of text. In the small example that Taneem sent us, the 
first few glyphs could be selected, but nothing after that. It is probably 
not a coincidence that this started with the first glyph that required OT 
tables, namely in the ta+ra conjunct in 'saaraa raatri'. Taneem can check up 
on this for the hajabarala PDF files.

> > So larger the font file size, larger will be the PS/PDF document
> > size. As in PDF the PS data are compressed the difference becomes
> > more prominent. I feel using mukti which has the smallest size of
> > all will result in the smallest PS/PDF file size.
> > Anirban
>
> That makes sense. So does this mean that the more number of glyphs a font
> has, the bigger the ps/pdf file size will be? Because to make a font look

Not necessarily true. As Michael pointed out once before, many of these fonts 
have glyphs that have far too many control points, so they may be large 
(compared to more efficiently designed fonts) even if they do not have many 
glyphs. Unfortunately, this is not easy to fix, since the problem arises from 
Pfaedit, which approximates the internal cubic spline representaion by 
quadratic splines when producing trutype.

> nicer (and for people like me to save some debugging time) one would want
> to add more glyphs for ligatures instead of complex OpenType rules... Has
> anyone come up with a middle point?