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Not entirely sure if this question belongs here here or not, but let's give it a try.

For a project I'm working on, the Arial font I find in my OS, or any downloadble Arial font I found so far in the web are too heavy, 100kbs+ per style.

Other fonts, like Helvetica, or Century are way lighter, in the order of one magnitude lighter.

So I was wondering, can font size be reduced?, maybe discarding symbols and other special characters that I wouldn't use?.

Any ideas are welcome!.

Artemix
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    In what platform? Some apps like Flash will let you limit the actual characters that get compiled into an app. But pretty much everything else pulls from a local library. So the size is rather irrelevant. You do, of course, have the option of creating your OWN font, that only has the characters you need. That would drop the weight considerably. – durbnpoisn Aug 26 '14 at 19:04
  • It is a Flex project, so yeah, Flash indeed. – Artemix Aug 26 '14 at 19:12

2 Answers2

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Moving to answer, because it's actually helpful:

In what platform? Some apps like Flash will let you limit the actual characters that get compiled into an app. But pretty much everything else pulls from a local library. So the size is rather irrelevant. You do, of course, have the option of creating your OWN font, that only has the characters you need. That would drop the weight considerably.

After response: Well, Flex is somewhat different because it lacks the IDE. But normally, when you embed the fonts, you can say, "include only a-z,A-Z,0-9". Like that. And only those characters will compile in. Presumably, those same compile options exist at the command-line level.

durbnpoisn
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  • Mhh not really an answer, but a good direction to research a bit more. – Artemix Aug 26 '14 at 19:23
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    I think it's correct enough. If you have the ability to package a font, then you have the ability to specify the "glyphs" that are used. Also, my other suggestion is a good option. There are plenty of open-source font creation packages out there. That might be the best option if my first idea doesn't work. – durbnpoisn Aug 26 '14 at 19:24
  • durbnpoisn i think your answer is helpful indeed but i'm looking forward to get additional infos. @Artemix please share your investigation results if it comes up with something new | nice question btw :) – Axel Aug 26 '14 at 20:01
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See this answer for details about how to reduce the size of the pdf by limiting the unicode range using CSS:

Invalid unicodeRange in CSS, Flex

Also check my comment in the correct answer, Adobe example omitted the U+ in the second range, that's why I was having those errors. It worked nicely, I could reduce the size by a considerable amount after that.

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Artemix
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