I just committed changes that add TTF subsetting to the PDF backend. It is completely analogous to the font subsetting recently added to the PS backend. I have added a configuration option, pdf.fonttype, to choose either "Type3" or "Truetype" font output. This may be removed in the future once the "Type3" stuff has been sufficiently tested. Some results: fonts_demo_kw.py: 201744 -> 37326 mathtext_demo.py: 129306 -> 26179 unicode_demo.py: 45303 -> 20084 over all demos in backend_driver.py: 5856001 -> 3390460 The differences aren't as dramatic as with Postscript, but IMHO they are still large enough to be worthwhile. Again, please help by testing with your own favorite PDF tools. Gory details about composite characters follow --> In this new code, composite characters (such as a character composed of a letter and an accent) aren't handled as they should be. According to the PDF spec, a PDF-1.2 (Acrobat 3.x) Type 3 font can reference other glyphs with the "Do" command, to avoid duplicating the components of a composite glyph. I was able to get this to work with Acrobat 7, but xpdf-3.0 and ggv 2.8.0 both choked on the file. Therefore, I decided to err on the side of compatibility by including each component of a composite character inline where it is used. This makes the PDF files larger than they would otherwise have to be. However, it should only be a real problem if a plot contains an inordinate amount of different accented characters. Cheers, Mike