PDFs produced by pdftex can shrink significantly in size when processed through ghostscript's pdfwrite driver. I understand a main reason for that is that ghostscript converts any Type 1 fonts that it finds into CFF (aka Type 1C) fonts. I also understand that - Type 1 fonts are eexec-encrypted, and such ciphertext cannot benefit from PDF's (de)flate compression. - CFF fonts, on the other hand, are a compacter plain-text format and compress well. - CFF fonts are also compatible with Type1, i.e. it is possible to convert any Type 1 font into a CFF font without loss of information. Is all of this correct? If so, isn't the continued use of Type 1 fonts in the TeX ecosystem an anachronism? Shouldn't TeXLive ship instead CFF/Type 1C versions of the BlueSky Computer Modern fonts and shouldn't tools like pdftex switch to using them directly? Has someone looked into what would be involved with a Type 1 to CFF migration for pdftex? It seems at the moment, pdftex is actually replacing any Type 1C glyphs that it finds in a PDF file embedded with \pdfximage with the much less space-efficient Type 1 glyphs that it find in its font map files. Has there been any progress on this since: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/38145/why-does-pdflatex-produce-bigg... ? Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain