[bug-pcl] reducing the size Ghostpcl generated PDFs

[Jonathan Hurley]

I have comparing the size of the PDFs generated by ghostpcl, with that
produced by a commercial pcl2pdf converter written by Visual software.
Ghostpcl is producing substantially larger PDFs. In one example the pdf
produced by Ghostpcl is 4.9 megabytes in size, while Visual's tool
produced a pdf of 27523 bytes. I understand that the difference is because
Ghostpcl is embedding fonts, whereas Visual is not.

I understand that embedding fonts means that the pdf will look the same on
all platforms, but sometimes it may be nicer to get a smaller file size
at the cost of some slight variations in fonts.

I am wondering whether it is possible at all to control which fonts are
embedded in the pdf documents, perhaps using the base 14 fonts as
substitues.  Alternatively if anyone is aware of open source software (for
Linux/Unix) that can help with this kind of thing, then I would be
interested.

Thanks for any help

Jon