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Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.

Terminal - Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.
gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=- -q -dNOPAUSE With-Fonts.pdf -c quit | ps2pdf - > No-Fonts.pdf
2009-03-25 03:46:00
User: qubyte
Functions: gs
2
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Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.

It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially.

I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.

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What others think

On my ubuntu/debian system, there is a pdf2ps command (a script), which invokes gs in a similar manner. So you could possibly try this instead:

pdf2ps With-Fonts.pdf | ps2pdf - > No-Fonts.pdf

I'm somewhat of a novice at this stuff, but I think the "stripping" happens only because postscript *cannot* embed fonts. Usually I want to embed fonts for submission of papers in PDF.

Comment by bwoodacre 75 weeks and 1 day ago

I'm pretty sure postscript embeds fonts. If you look in a ps or eps file you can actually read bits, so like pdf the specification must include standard fonts.

I'm not entirely sure how mine works, although I do get the individual flags. I really just added the pipe. It's based on a one liner I saw a long time ago that spat out postscript from postscript.

Comment by qubyte 75 weeks and 1 day ago

I've looked through the manpage for gs 8.61 and can't see how the specified options are asking the postscript interpreter to discard font information. This just seems more like a side effect to me rather than deliberate program action.

Comment by bwoodacre 75 weeks ago

Yup. That's pretty much the conclusion that I came to. It could be that you need to add a flag to preserve fonts and that's what's going on. Either way, it's worked for me for years and I've found it very useful.

I should note (and sorry this is confusing!) that when I say `remove embeded fonts' what I really mean is turn all the letters into normal vector graphics. This way the file is composed without any reference to text. The obvious side effects are that text in the pdf becomes unselectable and the file size goes up. I do this because Inkscape seems to fall over when it has to handle pdf fonts, and this fixes it.

Comment by qubyte 75 weeks ago

I updated it to get rid of a couple of needless bits.

Comment by qubyte 75 weeks ago

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