Ghostscript - reembed font - ghostscript

I want to user ghostscript to optimize pdf files.
My files are generated by iText, and there is font which is embeded too many times - 3000+;
I want to repring document with ghostscript, which will remove all embeded and embed it only once in file.
Do you know how to do it ?
And additional question - is there any difference detween ghostscript and ghost4j ?
Thanks

You cannot do that, most likely. Without seeing the file I cannot be certain, but the probability is that each font is embedded as a subset. That is it contains just a few of the glyphs that were originally present in the font.
So if the first instance contains, say a, c, f and g and the second instance contains b, e and h you can see that the two fonts are actually different.
Worse, the text is usually re-encoded, so the character codes are not what you would expect. In the example above, 'a' would not have the character code 0x61 (ASCII for 'a'), it would have the character code 1. c would be 2, f would be 3 and so on. But in the second case, character code 1 would be 'b', character code 2 would be 'e' etc.
There's no easy way to recombine the multiple font subsets, and also re-encode each set of text to the 'combined' font.
Where the pdfwrite device detects multiple subset fonts which have compatible encodings (the character codes used are unique in each font) it will combine them together. It won't attempt to re-encode them again though, so if the two fonts use the same character codes (as per my example above) pdfwrite will just emit two fonts.
Assuming you've already tried running the file through pdfwrite and didn't get the result you wanted, then that's it, you can't achieve the result you want with the current code.
Probably you can tell iText not to subset the fonts, which will solve the problem for you at the source, rather than trying to fix it afterwards.

Related

GS1-128 barcode with ZPL does not put the AI in ()

i was expecting this command
^FO15,240^BY3,2:1^BCN,100,Y,N,Y,^FD>:>842011118888^FS
to generate a
(420) 11118888
interpretation line, instead it generates
~n42011118888
anyone have idea how to generate the expected output?
TIA!
Joey
If the firmware is up to date, D mode can be used.
^BCo,h,f,g,e,m
^XA
^FO15,240
^BY3,2:1
^BCN,100,Y,N,Y,D
^FD(420)11118888^FS
^XZ
D = UCC/EAN Mode (x.11.x and newer firmware)
This allows dealing with UCC/EAN with and without chained
application identifiers. The code starts in the appropriate subset
followed by FNC1 to indicate a UCC/EAN 128 bar code. The printer
automatically strips out parentheses and spaces for encoding, but
prints them in the human-readable section. The printer automatically
determines if a check digit is required, calculate it, and print it.
Automatically sizes the human readable.
The ^BC command's "interpretation line" feature does not support auto-insertion of the parentheses. (I think it's safe to assume this is partly because it has no way of determining what your data identifier is by just looking at the data provided - it could be 420, could be 4, could be any other portion of the data starting from the first character.)
My recommendation is that you create a separate text field which handles the logic for the parentheses, and place it just above or below the barcode itself. This is the way I've always approached these in the past - I prefer this method because I have direct control over the font, font size, and formatting of the interpretation line.

CoreText: Get ligature glyph

I am using CoreText CTFontGetGlyphsForCharactersto get glyphs that correspond to unicode chars , i.e. UniChar. Now, I'd like to retrieve Ligature characters, for instance fi. Is there any way to retrieve ligature glyphs from CoreText (for instance by a series of unichars that should be combined)?
Thanks,
moka
After some useful advice from the Core Text mailing list, here is the solution:
You can't get ligatures directly from CTFont, as no API exists to do that.
What you do instead is the following:
Use CTLineCreateWithAttributedString() to create a text line from the character sequence whose ligature you want to get.
Make sure to set kCTLigatureAttributeName to either 1 or 2 on the attributed string to get ligatures.
If done correctly, with a ligature that exists in the font, you should get a CTLine containing one CTRun containing one CGGlyph which will be the ligated glyph you are looking for!
If you don't want to go down this route, the only other way appears to be parsing the Open - / True Type font tables yourself which I don't recommend.
Hope that helps!

Ruby 2: Recognizing decomposed utf8 in XML entities (NFD)

Problem
Problem is simple: I have XML containing this value
Mu¨ller
This appears to be valid XML format for representing a u with an umlaut, like this.
Müller
But all the parsers we have tried so far result in u¨ -- two distinct characters.
Background
This form of unicode (UTF-8) uses two codepoints to represent a single character; and is called Normalized Form Decomposed or NFD, and in binary is \303\274.
Most characters can also be represented as a single codepoint and entity, including this case. The XML could also have included ü or ü or ü and in binary is \195\188. This is called Normalized Form Composed. Any of these would work fine.
Getting Right to the Question
So I think the question is one of:
Is there a parser (doesn't seem to be nokogiri) that can detect and normalize to our preferred form?
Is there a reasonable way for us to reliably detect entities in the NFD form and convert them to the NFC form (or is there something that will do that out there?)
Thanks!
The character you’re using, U+00A8 (DIAERESIS) isn’t a combining character – it is distinct from U+0308 (COMBINING DIAERESIS). (I’ve only just discovered this myself – I don’t know what the use for the non-combining diaeresis is).
It looks like in this case this behaviour is correct and your XML is wrong (it should be using ̈ and not ¨).

Terminal overwriting same line when too long

In my terminal, when I'm typing over the end of a line, rather than start a new line, my new characters overwrite the beginning of the same line.
I have seen many StackOverflow questions on this topic, but none of them have helped me. Most have something to do with improperly bracketed colors, but as far as I can tell, my PS1 looks fine.
Here it is below, generated using bash -x:
PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\w \[\033[1;36m\]☔︎ \[\033[00m\] '
Yes, that is in fact an umbrella with rain; I have my Bash prompt update with the weather using a script I wrote.
EDIT:
My BashWeather script actually can put any one of a few weather characters, so it would be great if we could solve for all of these, or come up with some other solution:
☂☃☽☀︎☔︎
If the umbrella with rain is particularly problematic, I can change that to the regular umbrella without issue.
The symbol being printed ☔︎ consists of two Unicode codepoints: U+2614 (UMBRELLA WITH RAIN DROPS) and U+FE0E (VARIATION SELECTOR-15). The second of these is a zero-length qualifier, which is intended to enforce "text style", as opposed to "emoji style", on the preceding symbol. If you're viewing this with a font can distinguish the two styles, the following might be the emoji version: ☔︉ Otherwise, you can see a table of text and emoji variants in Working Group document N4182 (the umbrella is near the top of page 3).
In theory, U+FE0E should be recognized as a zero-length codepoint, like any other combining character. However, it will not hurt to surround the variant selector in PS1 with the "non-printing" escape sequence \[…\].
It's a bit awkward to paste an isolated variant selector directly into a file, so I'd recommend using bash's unicode-escape feature:
WEATHERCHAR=$'\u2614\[\ufe0e\]'
#...
PS1=...${WEATHERCHAR}...
Note that \[ and \] are interpreted before parameter expansion, so WEATHERCHAR as defined above cannot be dynamically inserted into the prompt. An alternative would be to make the dynamically-inserted character just the $'\u2614' umbrella (or whatever), and insert the $'\[\ufe0e\]' in the prompt template along with the terminal color codes, etc.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the variant indicator isn't needed at all. It certainly makes no useful difference on my Ubuntu system, where the terminal font I use (Deja Vu Sans Mono) renders both variants with a box around the umbrella, which is simply distracting, while the fonts used in my browser seem to render the umbrella identically with and without variants. But YMMV.
This almost works for me, so should probably not be considered a complete solution. This is a stripped down prompt that consists of only an umbrella and a space:
PS1='\342\230\[\224\357\270\] '
I use the octal escapes for the UTF-8 encoding of the umbrella character, putting the last three bytes inside \[...\] so that bash doesn't think they take up space on the screen. I initially put the last four bytes in, but at least in my terminal, there is a display error where the umbrella is followed by an extra character (the question-mark-in-a-diamond glyph for missing characters), so the umbrella really does occupy two spaces.
This could be an issue with bash and 5-byte UTF-8 sequences; using a character with a 4-byte UTF-encoding poses no problem:
# U+10400 DESERET CAPITAL LETTER LONG I
# (looks like a lowercase delta)
PS1='\360\220\220\200 '

Putting spaces back into a string of text with unreliable space information

I need to parse some text from pdfs but the pdf formatting results in extremely unreliable spacing. The result is that I have to ignore the spaces and have a continuous stream of non-space characters.
Any suggestions on how to parse the string and put spaces back into the string by guessing?
I'm using ruby. Or should I say I'musingruby?
Edit: I've pulled the text out using pdf-reader. Some of the pdf files are nicely formatted and some are not. An example of text mixed with positioning:
.7aspe-5.5cts-715.1o0.6f-708.5f-0.4aces-721.4that-716.3are-720.0i-1.8mportant-716.3in-713.9soc-5.5i-1.8alcommunica6.6tion6.3.-711.6Althoug6.3h-708.1m-1.9od6.3els-709.3o6.4f-702.8f5.4ace-707.9proc6.6essing-708.2haveproposed-611.2ways-615.5to-614.7deal-613.2with-613.0these-613.9diff10.4erent-613.7tasks,-611.9it-617.1remainsunclear-448.0how-450.7these-443.2mechanisms-451.7might-446.7be-447.7implemented-447.2in-450.3visualOne-418.9model-418.8of-417.3human-416.4face-421.9processing-417.5proposes-422.7that-419.8informa-tion-584.5is-578.0processed-586.1in-583.1specialised-584.7modules-577.0(Breen-584.4et-582.9al.,-582.32002;Bruce-382.1and-384.0Y92.0oung,-380.21986;-379.2Haxby-379.9et-380.5al.,-
and if I print just string data (I added returns at the end of each line to keep it from
messing up the layout here:
'Distinctrepresentationsforfacialidentityandchangeableaspectsoffacesinthehumantemporal
lobeTimothyJ.Andrews*andMichaelP.EwbankDepartmentofPsychology,WolfsonResearchInstitute,
UniversityofDurham,UKReceived23December2003;revised26March2004;accepted27July2004Availab
leonline14October2004Theneuralsystemunderlyingfaceperceptionmustrepresenttheunchanging
featuresofafacethatspecifyidentity,aswellasthechangeableaspectsofafacethatfacilitates
ocialcommunication.However,thewayinformationaboutfacesisrepresentedinthebrainremainsc
ontroversial.Inthisstudy,weusedfMRadaptation(thereductioninfMRIactivitythatfollowsthe
repeatedpresentationofidenticalimages)toaskhowdifferentface-andobject-selectiveregionsofvisualcortexcontributetospecificaspectsoffaceperception'
The data is spit out by callbacks so if I print each string as it is returned it looks like this:
'The
-571.3
neural
-573.7
system
-577.4
underly
13.9
ing
-577.2
face
-573.0
perc
13.7
eption
-574.9
must
-572.1
repr
20.8
esent
-577.0
the
unchangin
14.4
g
-538.5
featur
16.5
es
-529.5
of
-536.6
a
-531.4
face
'
On examination it looks like the true spaces are large negative numbers < -300 and the false spaces are much smaller positive numbers. Thanks guys. Just getting to the point where i am asking the question clearly helped me answer it!
Hmmmm... I'd have to say that guessing is never a good idea. Looking at the problem root cause and solving that is the answer, anything else is a kludge.
If the spacing is unreliable from the PDF, how is it unreliable? The PDF viewer needs to be able to reliably space the text so the data is there somewhere, you just need to find it.
EDIT following comment:
The idea of parsing the file using a dictionary (your only other option really, apart from randomly inserting spaces and hoping for the best) and inserting spaces at identified word boundaries (a real problem when dealing with punctuation, plurals that don't alter the base word i.e. plural, etc) would, I believe, be a much greater programming challenge than correctly parsing the PDF in the first place. After all, PDF is clearly defined whereas English is somewhat wooly.
Why not look down the route of existing solutions like ps2ascii in linux, call the function from your Ruby and pick up the result.
PDF doesn't only store spaces as space characters, but also uses layout commands for spacing (so it doesn't print a space, but moves the "pen" to the right). Perhaps you should have a look at the PDF reference (the big PDF on the bottom of the site), Chapter 9 "Text" should be what you're looking for.
EDIT: After reading your comment to Lazarus' answer, this doesn't seem to be what you're looking for. I think you should try to get a word list from somewhere and try to split your text using it. A good strategy would be to do that using recursion, because for example:
"meandyou"
The first word could be "me" or "mean", but if you try "mean", "dyou" doesn't make sense, so it will be "me", same for the next word that could be "a" or "an" or "and", only "and" makes sense.
If it were me I'd go back to the source PDFs and try a different method of extracting the text, such as iText (for Java) or maybe some kind of PDF-to-HTML to text conversion software method.

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