Michael,
Pdftocairo is a good tool to know so thanks for that tip.
I still think currently it is a regression with the current 'stamp' method
to use it on all accounts. I understand in a complicated figure with a
bunch of subplots that this would be beneficial and create smaller code. I
don't see how in single figures this would often result in reduced files
sizes. I usually output single figures with one plot and I don't think one
of them that I am currently working on was smaller in 1.4.x. They all
resulted in reduced file sizes with mpl 1.1.1. This figure of 3d spheres
resulted in 60kb instead of roughly 80kb after running pdftocairo. Anyway,
you said in coming versions a threshold should be set before stamping of
objects occurs so a fix is on the way eventually.
Thanks for all the help,
Jeff
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 11:31 PM, Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu>wrote:
> On 07/30/2013 04:20 PM, Jeffrey Spencer wrote:
>
> Michael,
>
> Thanks that is very informative. Answers most of the problems I was
> having and read MEP14 which looks really useful
>
> That being said does the ps backend subset the fonts or use collections
> for drawing (is the collections feature global or just in the pdf backend)?
>
>
> The ps backend has the same behavior as pdf on both counts. TTF fonts are
> subsetted, but the fonts that come from TeX come to use as Type1 fonts,
> which matplotlib currently does not know how to subset. It also handles
> collections in the same way (by creating a "stamp" and reusing it).
>
>
> I usually use .eps output and convert to pdf using epstopdf unless the
> figure has an alpha channel because always results in a much smaller file
> (60kB roughly for this file or plain figure around 10kB) than direct pdf
> output with the output looking the same. I pretty much always have
> usetex=True so maybe the pdf file is always embedding the full fonts.
>
>
> Yes, when usetex=True, matplotlib does not do any font subsetting (in any
> backend). To get around this limitation, one can use the `pdftocairo` tool
> (part of poppler utils), to convert from pdf to a pdf with subsetted
> fonts. With your example, I was able to get the pdf down to ~80k. With
> MEP14, we would basically move such functionality into matplotlib itself,
> but that's sort of a long term, semi-back-burner project so it could be a
> while.
>
> It's possible that epstopdf is doing some font subsetting of its own. But
> as you point out, Postscript (as a specification) doesn't support alpha, so
> it's not useful when you need alpha.
>
>
>
> Also, does the Cairo backend support usetex=True or subsetting? I know I
> had read it did not support usetex but that was maybe 2 years ago or so.
> The x,y,z axis look correct with cairo but the IPA Fonts don't render
> properly. The legend font says it is size 12 but if you zoom in extremely
> close you can see they are the correct fonts just way to small. The file
> size is around 60kB as well so I am guessing it supports subsetting of
> fonts.
>
>
> Cairo does support font subsetting, but the matplotlib Cairo backend has
> no support for usetex. I'm surprised this worked for you at all. When I
> run your example with the Cairo backend, the IPA characters appear as raw
> TeX source code, i.e. "\textipa{i}", which is what I would expect given
> that the regular font renderer doesn't understand that syntax.
>
>
>
> The pgf backend would also subset fonts if output to .pdf I'm assuming
> because that is the default with pdftex? It results in similar size files
> to the .eps output for this file (roughly 60kB also).
>
>
> Yes.
>
>
>
> The IPA font uses the package (\usepackage{tipa}) and therefore that is
> why I think these look differently. That package draws these fonts with
> its' font libraries instead of whatever is selected as the text font. Maybe
> I'm wrong about this but that is my understanding because even in normal
> latex code the fonts look different than the standard text.
>
>
> That is correct. The default font for usetex=True is Computer Modern,
> whereas it is Bitstream Vera Sans in the default font rendering. I was
> referring to the difference between 1.2 and 1.4 which was using TeX fonts
> in both cases, but due to a bug in 1.3/1.4 was rendering the IPA in serif
> when you had requested sans-serif.
>
> Mike
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Jeff
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu>wrote:
>
>> There are two different things going on here.
>>
>> Between 1.2.1 and now, there was a bugfix to the font selection routine
>> that inadvertently introduced a bug selecting fonts in the usetex backend.
>> You may notice that on master, the IPA font selected is different. The
>> file size difference can be attributed to the slightly larger font size of
>> the one it selected vs. the one it should have. Note that when usetex is
>> True, the fonts are not subsetted, so you always get the full font embedded
>> in the file (MEP14 work will fix this in the future).
>>
>> See b5c340 for the bug that introduced the commit, and
>> https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/2260 for the fix (which
>> should make it into 1.3.0 final).
>>
>> Between 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 a change was made in how collections are
>> handled. Previously, each path was redrawn individually. In 1.2, if a
>> path is reused multiple times, a "stamp" is created and then it is "used"
>> multiple times. In principle, this generally reduces file sizes by a large
>> amount. However, in the case of this figure with the 3D spheres, each path
>> is used only once, so rather than getting the file size savings of that
>> approach, we only get the overhead. The backend could be smarter by not
>> doing this when the path is only used a small number of times. Such a fix
>> would be welcome, but is probably too large/risky to try to get into the
>> current release cycle. It will have to wait for 1.3.1
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mike
>>
>>
>>
>> On 07/30/2013 12:24 PM, Jeffrey Spencer wrote:
>>
>> K, I have just made the script self-contained but it loads external data
>> so I have attached that as well. If you want me to just separate out the
>> plotting commands let me know. I have also attached my matplotlib rc file
>> which is the same on all three systems. All the modifications to the
>> matplotlibrc file are copied to the top and in the first 30 lines or so.
>>
>> Of note, the smallest file sizes for pdf are using the pgf backend
>> around 60kb. Not sure if that helps at all. It is also around the same size
>> if I export to .eps and then convert to pdf. About 60kb. The problem with
>> eps in these 3d figures though is the back wall I think has an alpha
>> channel because just becomes a solid wall in the output. No lines through
>> it like the other two walls.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 11:23 PM, Jouni K. Seppänen <j...@iki.fi> wrote:
>>
>>> Jeffrey Spencer <jeffspenc...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>> > I have three different versions of matplotlib that all output different
>>> > file sizes with matplotlib 1.1.1 providing the smallest. This is for
>>> the
>>> > same exact script. I can post the script if that helps.
>>> >
>>> > MPL 1.4.x: 539.32kb, Ubuntu 12.10
>>> > MPL 1.1.1: 172.56kb Ubuntu 12.10
>>> > MPL 1.2.1: 475.9kb, Ubuntu 13.04
>>>
>>> Yes, it would be interesting to know what the plotting commands are.
>>> Just as a guess, since all the sizes are a few hundred kilobytes, it
>>> could be a difference in e.g. font embedding - many TrueType fonts are
>>> of comparable size.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jouni K. Seppänen
>>> http://www.iki.fi/jks
>>>
>>>
>>>
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