Thanks...Originally I opened up the PS file in a text editor
> and saw lines of hex data - I assumed it was a raster version
> of the plot. Now I see that hex data is describing the
> fonts, and there are standard vector descriptors at the end
> of the file.
That's right -- to support mathtext and font compatibility between the
raster formats and ps output, we embed the truetype font information
directly into the file. Unfortunately, we haven't yet succeeded in
getting just the characters we need embedded in the file, and have to
dump the whole font file. We have a couple of approaches to fix this,
and so the file size issue should get better in future releases.
The only rasters we embed in postscript are images you create with
imshow or figimage -- everything else is vector graphics.
JDH