[tex-live] Making texts externally replaceable in PDFs, e.g. with sed(1)

[Osipov, Michael]

Am 2018-12-17 um 14:26 schrieb Arthur Reutenauer:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 12:25:03PM +0100, Osipov, Michael wrote:
>> It simply contradicts XeLaTeX's approach to work with Unicode fonts only, if
>> available. IMHO.
> 
>    But that’s only best practice, not a technical requirement.  I would
> argue that you can’t afford to follow best practice here because you’ve
> already made (if implicitly) the decision to find technical solutions to
> what is fundamentally a human problem.  The idea of post-processing PDF
> files with sed is, quite frankly, insane, and shows a poor understanding
> of the PDF format and the technical requirements for automated
> typesetting.

Granted, this is what I have documented in our internal issue tracker. I 
complete dislike this broken approach.

>    Since you’ve apparently given up -- and I can understand why you would
> -- on convincing the team responsible for post-processing to adopt a
> better approach, you need to make the best possible use of the tools at
> your disposal in this abnormal situation.  Using an 8-bit font with
> XeTeX is a reasonable price to pay, and won’t hurt its feelings :-)

I haven't really given up, but went quite far to fully understand the 
issue which I did and now understand PDF much better than before.

At the end, it is a cost/benefit decision which I don't make. I do the 
technical analysis and coding. The font type 1 approach is way easier 
than using QPDF in QDF mode and modifying streams.

My conclusion in our tracker: "Meine Empfehlung, komplett sein lassen, 
Problem anders lösen." -- "My recommendation, don't do, solve differently."

Michael