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Type-1 font subsetting #20716

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Merged
merged 6 commits into from
Jun 6, 2025
Merged

Type-1 font subsetting #20716

merged 6 commits into from
Jun 6, 2025

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jkseppan
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@jkseppan jkseppan commented Jul 22, 2021

PR Summary

Type-1 subsetting

This reduces pdf file sizes when usetex is active, at the cost of
some complexity in the code. We implement a charstring bytecode
interpreter to keep track of subroutine calls in font programs.

Recommend merging to main to give people time to test this, not to
a 3.10 point release.

Give dviread.DviFont a fake filename attribute and a get_fontmap
method for character tracking.

Add type hints to the code this touches.

Closes #127.

PR Checklist

  • Has pytest style unit tests (and pytest passes).
  • Is Flake 8 compliant (run flake8 on changed files to check).
  • New features are documented, with examples if plot related.
  • Documentation is sphinx and numpydoc compliant (the docs should build without error).
  • Conforms to Matplotlib style conventions (install flake8-docstrings and run flake8 --docstring-convention=all).
  • New features have an entry in doc/users/next_whats_new/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).
  • API changes documented in doc/api/next_api_changes/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).

@anntzer
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anntzer commented Oct 5, 2021

Is this ready for review, now that #20715 has been merged?

@jkseppan
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jkseppan commented May 4, 2025

This is failing on Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows but passing on 24.04 and Mac. Here's one failing image (test_usetex_pdf.png, so converted from pdf to png on the test system).

test_usetex_pdf

This looks like the font is entirely broken. The expected image similarly converted looks like this:

test_usetex-expected_pdf

Strangely enough, the generated pdf file looks fine on my Mac.

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jkseppan commented May 4, 2025

I can repeat the error running on an Ubuntu 22.04 docker image:

GPL Ghostscript 9.55.0 (2021-09-27)
Copyright (C) 2021 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
This software is supplied under the GNU AGPLv3 and comes with NO WARRANTY:
see the file COPYING for details.
Processing pages 1 through 1.
Page 1
   **** Error: can't process embedded font stream,
        attempting to load the font using its name.
               Output may be incorrect.
Querying operating system for font files...
Substituting font Helvetica for MPLAAD+CMR17.
Loading NimbusSans-Regular font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.55.0/Resource/Font/NimbusSans-Regular... 4467044 2957798 6795968 5451925 4 done.
   **** Error: can't process embedded font stream,
        attempting to load the font using its name.
               Output may be incorrect.
Substituting font Helvetica for MPLAAC+CMR12.
   **** Error: can't process embedded font stream,
        attempting to load the font using its name.
               Output may be incorrect.
Substituting font Helvetica for MPLAAA+CMEX10.
   **** Error: can't process embedded font stream,
        attempting to load the font using its name.
               Output may be incorrect.
Substituting font Helvetica-Oblique for MPLAAB+CMMI12.
Loading NimbusSans-Italic font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.55.0/Resource/Font/NimbusSans-Italic... 4534308 3175939 7138400 5761600 4 done.

The subsetting is wrong in some way that breaks Ghostscript 9.55 but not the viewer in macOS or the newer Ghostscript in Ubuntu 24.04. (Ghostscript 9.56 has a completely rewritten PDF interpreter.)

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jkseppan commented May 4, 2025

I hope I found the culprit... I was writing an extra delimiter between the Subrs and the Charstrings when one was already there.

@jkseppan jkseppan force-pushed the type1-subset branch 2 times, most recently from 9c5d971 to 9a9dc05 Compare May 4, 2025 17:15
@jkseppan jkseppan marked this pull request as ready for review May 4, 2025 17:16
@@ -35,10 +37,64 @@

from matplotlib.cbook import _format_approx
from . import _api
if T.TYPE_CHECKING:
from collections.abc import Iterable
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We tend not to have inline type hints (and I personally very much don't like them), but there are a few exceptions (e.g. _mathtext.py) so I guess it's up to you whether you want to leave them in.

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Right – I saw that there are some files with type hints, and figured that the project might be in the process of adding them. I've found type hints pretty useful at work, but of course we should have a consistent style in the project. Has this been discussed in the past on the dev list or somewhere?

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I'm probably among the most vocal opponents, but I'll defer to @QuLogic or @ksunden on this aspect.

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I gave my opinion on our gitter, but I'll copy the main comment here for the sake of consolidation/potential for finding it in the future:

I would say type hints are a net positive in my opinion, though I acknowledge that there are problems (perhaps especially in a case like ours where APIs were designed well before type hints).

We went with stub files on initial implementation specifically to minimize some risk, specifically since the stub files have are not even loaded at runtime, there was no chance of them interfering.

However, I do think inline reduces a level ongoing maintenance risk, in particular the chance of the two files getting out of sync. (We have tooling/CI in place to help catch such things, but don't think it fully removes the risk)

The other factor is that stub files allow us draw the line at public APIs, and not have to worry about typing our internal logic. (Which has positives and negatives, positives being largely catching additional problems by type checker, negative largely being the surface area that needs to be covered.)

So in all, I think my personal recommendation would be a relatively slow uptake, where we keep the stub files for most public facing things in the interim, do inline type hints for internal logic when it makes sense to do so (e.g. when doing so is actively helpful for some refactor/feature addition/etc) then once the majority of internal logic has inline hints, consider inlining the hints of the more public facing APIs.

So looking at this example in particular, I think this does fall within my recommendation there. I am not personally opposed to it, but also not hard pulling for it. I do question a bit whether to advocate for "do minimal as you are working and motivated" or "the unit for adding type hints should be one file at a time". Doing the latter would carry the advantage that you get a better sense of how complete the hints are, but the disadvantage of asking people to type hint 3-4x what they were otherwise looking at (in this case, for example), which also impacts the review-ability of the PR as there are lots of changes that are actually orthogonal.

For what its worth, this particular file already has one function which got an inline typehint added in #27796

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and @tacaswell responded

It is worth re-opening the discussion of in-line type hints
the world seems to have stabilized and in other projects I have had type hints catch actual bugs before I ran the code (but I have also had to spend 15 minutes trying to sort out how to placate the type checker for code that clearly works a couple of times)

The type hints were useful for me while working on this, since VS Code pointed out some obvious mistakes in real time. But I agree that it is not ideal to leave the file only partially annotated, since it does not pass a full type check in its current state.

I could remove the extra type hints from this PR and make a separate PR to add hints to the whole file?

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Sure, let's just go for it. I'm not going to be able to resist this forever 🙄

The old optimization where the same font file and descriptor could be
shared by multiple differently-encoded fonts is wrong in the presence of
subsetting, unless we also take the exact glyph subset into account.
It is very unlikely for the exact same subset to be used by different
encodings, so just remove the optimization.

Rearrange _embedTeXFont in neater blocks.
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QuLogic commented Jun 4, 2025

It looks like you'll need to install heuristica and DejaVuSans texlive packages in .github/workflows/tests.yml to get those new tests running.

@QuLogic QuLogic moved this to Ready for Review in Font and text overhaul Jun 5, 2025
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jkseppan commented Jun 5, 2025

It looks like you'll need to install heuristica and DejaVuSans texlive packages in .github/workflows/tests.yml to get those new tests running.

Yes, but Debian (and hence Ubuntu) bundles them into texlive-fonts-extra with a large number of other fonts. Not sure that slowing down all test runners is worth it, but perhaps we could do it in just one runner?

[Edit: Or we could see if we can install packages via tlmgr. Debian recommends against it but I don't think we need to worry about messing with package dependencies in a CI script.]

@jkseppan jkseppan force-pushed the type1-subset branch 2 times, most recently from f0c24a2 to d8b5aec Compare June 5, 2025 04:11
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QuLogic commented Jun 5, 2025

Here are the times for the "Install OS dependencies" step in the previous 3 commits:

Commit 3.11 minver 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.13 freethread 3.12 arm
5006acc 1m9s 1m21s 2m59s 1m52s 1m24s 3m54s
546a767 1m10s 1m24s 2m23s 1m52s 1m22s 3m19s
5c2f6bd 1m13s 1m15s 2m16s 2m42 1m15s 2m20s

And for the 2 last commits with the additional 1 or 2 packages:

Commit 3.11 minver 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.13 freethread 3.12 arm
7741e9b 2m31s 2m36s 5m3s 2m50s 2m10s 3m25s
f411fb3 2m30s 2m58s 2m56s 2m34s 2m5s 5m15s

It looks like it would add about ~1m per job?

It's unfortunate we aren't running on Fedora, where all texlive packages are available individually (though no guarantee that'd be faster.)

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jkseppan commented Jun 5, 2025

Some ideas:

  • install TeX without using the Ubuntu packages, with e.g. TinyTeX (not guaranteed to be faster)
  • run the tests inside Docker, build images in phases so the base OS and TeX are installed in advance, store the images in GitHub Container Registry (can almost certainly shave off several minutes off the build time, at the cost of some complexity and may need to pay GitHub for the GHCR storage)
  • set up TeX only in a subset of the test runners, or dedicate some runners to TeX tests only (the latter would increase parallelism and might reduce wall-clock time, but Amdahl's law applies)

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I think option 3 (only run on a subset). I would go with the newest Python.

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QuLogic commented Jun 6, 2025

Should be able to set an optional addition in the matrix just like we do with matrix.extra-requirements.

@jkseppan jkseppan force-pushed the type1-subset branch 2 times, most recently from c8e8c11 to 892df4f Compare June 6, 2025 03:34
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jkseppan commented Jun 6, 2025

I moved the packages texlive-latex-extra, texlive-fonts-extra and texlive-lang-cyrillic to one runner only. (The texlive-latex-extra package has been included for a long time and I'm not sure which exact LaTeX dependencies are used by our tests.)

Complete run times:

Job Run time  
Python 3.11 on ubuntu-22.04 (Minimum Versions) 18m 37s  
Python 3.11 on ubuntu-22.04 17m 31s  
Python 3.12 on ubuntu-22.04-arm 12m 22s  
Python 3.13 on ubuntu-22.04 (Extra TeX packages) 20m 25s  
Python 3.13t on ubuntu-22.04 Free-threaded 16m 58s  
Python 3.12 on ubuntu-24.04 20m 3s  
Python 3.11 on macos-13 24m 18s  
Python 3.12 on macos-14 17m 44s  
Python 3.13 on macos-14 16m 36s  
Create issue on failure 0s  
  2h 44m 34s  

For comparison, a recent commit on main:

Job Run time  
Python 3.11 on ubuntu-22.04 (Minimum Versions) 19m 24s  
Python 3.11 on ubuntu-22.04 17m 10s  
Python 3.12 on ubuntu-22.04-arm 11m 15s  
Python 3.13 on ubuntu-22.04 18m 24s  
Python 3.13t on ubuntu-22.04 Free-threaded 16m 54s  
Python 3.12 on ubuntu-24.04 20m 32s  
Python 3.11 on macos-13 22m 39s  
Python 3.12 on macos-14 16m 5s  
Python 3.13 on macos-14 15m 9s  
Create issue on failure 0s  
  2h 37m 32s  

In this case it seems to have added a little under two minutes to that runner, including both the time taken to install and the extra tests run. There seems to be quite a bit of variation from run to run, and most of the overall increase is due to the macos builders where I don't think we even install TeX.

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QuLogic commented Jun 6, 2025

https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/install/dependencies.html#latex-dependencies says it's for import, sfmath, and type1cm, and type1cm is used unconditionally in the preamble. According to the log, texlive-latex-extra is already being installed by dependency of something else which is why it didn't break, so I don't think it makes sense to move it to the extras job only. It should stay for explicitness in all jobs.

The DejaVu and Heuristica fonts are used by the type-1 font
subsetting tests.

Heuristica has a Cyrillic encoding and apparently cannot be
loaded without installing texlive-lang-cyrillic.
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jkseppan commented Jun 6, 2025

texlive-latex-extra is already being installed by dependency of something else which is why it didn't break, so I don't think it makes sense to move it to the extras job only. It should stay for explicitness in all jobs.

Agreed! I changed that package back.

@QuLogic QuLogic merged commit 7c49d52 into matplotlib:main Jun 6, 2025
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@github-project-automation github-project-automation bot moved this from Ready for Review to Done in Font and text overhaul Jun 6, 2025
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QuLogic commented Jun 6, 2025

Closes #127.

Congrats on closing a 3-digit issue.

@jkseppan jkseppan deleted the type1-subset branch June 6, 2025 12:44
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When text.usetex=True with pdf backend, full subset of latex fonts is embedded into pdf file
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