Inefficient font embedding in XChange Std V7

[bobdanker]

After upgrading to the XChange Std V7 printer driver, I printed a document from Word that was one page long, consisted of text only (no graphics), and used the regular, bold, and italic members of the Windows 10 Calibri font. The resulting PDF created by the V7 driver was >400 KB, with almost all that size taken up by the embedded fonts. When I uninstalled the V7 driver, reinstalled the V6 driver, and re-created the PDF using the V6 driver, the resulting size was 83 KB. When I print the same file to PDF using the free PDFCreator printer from pdfforge.org, the resulting size was 88 KB, essentially the same as with the V6 XChange driver. Something is wrong with the efficiency of the font embedding in V7 of the XChange Std driver. I pay attention to the size of the PDFs that I create; I like them to be as small as possible. Please investigate and resolve. In the meantime, I will continue to use the V6 driver.

I have attached the relevant files.

Thank you for your consideration.

Bob Danker

[Ovg]

Have you checked «Embed All Used Fonts» in V7 printer preferences? In Windows 7 I got from your sample docx pdf file with size of 10Kb.

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Thanks for the advice Ovg,

Bob Danker - this is definitely an issue with the settings for font embedding, and how much you want the drivers to add to your file - as with my 'default' driver settings - I got a file smaller than 10KB (admittedly with no fonts embedded) - as can be seen in the attachment!

Cheers,
Stefan

[bobdanker]

If you look carefully at the three PDFs that I sent you, you will see that all three have the same fonts embedded (Calibri regular, bold, and italic). These are Windows 10 system fonts, but I still prefer to embed all fonts in the PDFs that I create. You can check it in the XChange Editor (File...Save as Optimized...Audit space usage) and find that the difference in the file size between the PDF generated by the V7 driver and the V6 and PDFCreator drivers is purely in the space occupied by the embedded fonts. Therefore, I still believe there is a problem with font embedding in the V7 Std driver.

Bob

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hi Bob,
Thank you for your post. I can clearly and reliably reproduce this issue the same as you have detailed. With V7 the file is 400+KB but just over 80KB in V6. I have reported this issue to the dev team and created an internal development ticket for this issue. Please reference RT#4183: Issue with embedded fonts Standard V7 when requesting an update for the issue.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We apologize for the inconvenience.

[bobdanker]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your response. I pay attention to the size of PDFs, especially those with embedded fonts. This is important especially in producing PDF/A, in which all fonts are required to be embedded, and file size should be as small as possible for archiving. In the past I have had issues with PDF Tools and the size of PDF/A files created. I found that the size was greatly inflated over files produced by other PDF software, such as Nuance's Power PDF and Foxit's PhantomPDF. Nevertheless, in my opinion, your software is the best of its class in many respects. Thank you for your excellent products that are always improving.

Bob

[bobdanker]

Hi Again,

I just checked out how PDF Tools works when it converts a PDF with essentially no fonts embedded to a PDF/A-1b. Again, the font embedding is inefficient, with a 7.82 KB file becoming >400 KB after conversion to PDF/A. This means that the font embedding issue applies to all the XChange products. See if you can reproduce the problem by converting the attached file.

Bob

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi bob,

Ive gone along and tested this with the remainder of our product line as you said, Seems it is only affecting Tools, lite, and standard. Saving as PDF from inside the editor (Regular,Plus,Pro) comes out as small as usual for me over here. Either way Patrick has put through the ticket and they are looking into it already

[bobdanker]

Did you save as PDF/A inside the Editor, or regular PDF?

Bob

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hi Bob,

I suspect the mechanism to convert to PDF/A is the same across our products. I am seeing this issue in the Editor as well. Your original PDF is only 7KB, but after converting to PDF/A the file is now 428.63KB. I suspect Daniel did not notice because by default the new PDF/A is not opened, so he likely was looking again at the original. I have included this information in the ticket.

Please do let us know if you discover anything else.
Cheers!

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hello all,

I am happy to announce that this issue has been set to resolved. Please try the latest build available here: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/product/downloads

Cheers!