PDF backend

Development matplotlib-devel
#1

John Hunter <jdhunter@...5...> writes:

FYI, matplotlib used to depend on fonttools, but we found the
dependency too onerous and booted it and wrote our own, lighter
freetype support. So I would be reluctant to reintroduce this
dependency.

OK. Was it just that you don't want to require mpl users to install
fonttools, or were there other problems with it?

Does anyone here have experience with subsetting TrueType fonts (or
Type 1 or OpenType, for that matter)? One pretty frequent complaint is
that the eps files produced by matplotlib can be huge because they
include the full font. Nowadays some popular fonts include characters
for Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly even Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean, so a font can be several megabytes large.

···

--
Jouni

#2

I do not have experience in subsetting TrueType fonts, but I read the
pure Python code dedicated to this task in ReportLab:

    http://www.reportlab.co.uk/svn/public/reportlab/trunk/reportlab/pdfbase/ttfonts.py

It proves it's possible to achieve it in pure Python, without
requiring fonttools. And it can be a good source of inspiration.
Perhaps the licence is compatible with matplotlib's one?

···

On 11/5/06, Jouni K Seppanen <jks@...278...> wrote:

Does anyone here have experience with subsetting TrueType fonts (or
Type 1 or OpenType, for that matter)? One pretty frequent complaint is
that the eps files produced by matplotlib can be huge because they
include the full font. Nowadays some popular fonts include characters
for Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly even Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean, so a font can be several megabytes large.