[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.995: large PDFs from excessive Tm (text matrix) operators?

[James Devenish]

Hi XeTeX list,

I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts or experiences with large
files from XeTeX (xdv2pdf). A file which could be a few hundred
kilobytes ends up in megabytes. My e-mail (below) is from last year,
but there haven't been any new releases since then, so I guess the
situation is probably still the same.

---------- Begin forwarded message ----------
Hi,

I recently downloaded XeTeX 0.995 and I am typesetting some
texts with archaic English letters and swashes (via fontspec).
However, I find XeTeX's PDFs are quite large. I see something odd
with xdv2pdf that might explain it.

If I typeset a phrase like "Hello there!", I get good behaviour from
Apple Text Edit Print-to-PDF, pdfLaTeX and XeTeX (-no-pdf option).
Basically, all these tools produce one "move to" command and
one "text" command.

However, xdv2pdf splits the words into individual characters and
issues a "move to" every time. I wonder if this causes the PDFs to be
so large. (The move-to co-ordinates probably don't compress well).
Is there a way to avoid it? Since Text Edit gives a good result, I
assume this is a problem wiht xdv2pdf, not Quartz.

For example, pdfTeX produces this:

BT /F8 9.9626 Tf 148.7123 707.1251 Td[(Hello)-333(there!)]TJ 154.421
-567.8705 Td[(1)]TJ ET

But xdv2pdf produces all this (!):

q Q q q 1 0 0 1 72 -72 cm BT 10 0 0 10 76.712326 779.23535 Tm /F1.0 1
Tf (H) Tj 10 0 0 10 84.184326 779.23535 Tm (e) Tj 10 0 0 10 88.612175
779.23535 Tm (l) Tj 10 0 0 10 91.379585 779.23535 Tm (l) Tj 10 0 0 10
94.146996 779.23535 Tm (o) Tj 10 0 0 10 102.4492 779.23535 Tm (t) Tj
10 0 0 10 106.32358 779.23535 Tm (h) Tj 10 0 0 10 111.85839 779.23535
Tm (e) Tj 10 0 0 10 116.28625 779.23535 Tm (r) Tj 10 0 0 10 120.1883
779.23535 Tm (e) Tj 10 0 0 10 124.61616 779.23535 Tm (!) Tj 10 0 0 10
231.13326 211.36487 Tm (1) Tj ET Q Q

Also, I recently discovered xdvipdfmx but it usually crashes with my
documents, so it cannot solve my problem yet.

James.
---------- End forwarded message ----------