Oh didn't know about the improved type 42 font support in the new matplotlib! That's good to know and I should check it out.

And good point, the PGF works just as well (results should be identical), but since all the plot information has to be compiled by latex, it ends up ballooning the compilation time of the tex doc and the matplotlib PGF page suggests that you can run into memory issues as well. I was doing this for a thesis with 50+ plots and so still wanted compilation to be fast.

I've suggested this as an improvement to matplotlib, but unlikely to be merged since maybe it's a bit hacky (although it's very similar to what Inkscape's export to LaTeX option does): https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/22297 (the backend file can be found here: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/files/7921801/backe...)

And the gs script is below:

  #!/bin/bash
  set -e
  set -o pipefail
  if [ -z $1 ]; then
    echo "Supply input output"
    exit 1;
  fi

  if [ -z $2 ]; then
    outfile="$(basename ${1} .pdf)-small.pdf"
    if [ -f $outfile ]; then
      echo "WARNING ${outfile} already exists."
      echo "Supply input output"
      exit 1;
    fi
  else
    outfile="${2}"
  fi

  gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dQUIET -dDetectDuplicateImages=true -r150 -sOutputFile="${outfile}" "${1}"

  pre_b=$(wc -c "${1}" | cut -d' ' -f1)
  post_b=$(wc -c "${outfile}" | cut -d' ' -f1)
  if (( $pre_b <= $post_b )); then
    echo "Original is smaller ($pre_b -> $post_b). copying..."
    cp "${1}" "${outfile}"
  fi

user:	jamiedamien
created:	July 30, 2020
karma:	13