Re: [xmlroff] Hugly PDF output

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

pca...@ca... writes:
> Sorry for the rough subject but this is really important to me.
>
> I have been playing the whole day yesterday with XMLroff and was very
> pleased by the results even if it is still beta.
> I was very pleased until I had a look at the generated PDF file which
> looked like very big compared to the amount of text inside the document.
>
> It looks like that the pages are just images embedded in PDF therefore
> the files are big, the text cannot be copied/paste and it is not
> possible to search text inside the document. I am using xpdf to display
> pdf files.
>
> Is this a bug or a feature?
>
> Is it due to the backend and will it evolve or not in the future?

I think you'll find that most of the PDF file is embedded fonts, not
graphic images of the text.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to tell gnome-print to not embed
fonts, which is good for reproducible output but not so good for
producing small-size files (as you have seen).

Have you tried copying and pasting text from xmlroff output?

It's not something that I usually do, but I did just try it with the
DocBook sample that Tim Waugh sent yesterday and got complete
gibberish:

   8MXPI 8EFPI SJ 'SRXIRXW 7IGXMSR XMXPI 7IGXMSR XMXPI 4EVEKVETL

(It does appear to be a cipher of what it should be, not that that
makes it useful for anything.)

Is that what you were referring to?

Regards,


Tony.