A page that carries no font

Four faces every reader already draws, set on one page, so the file holds no font at all — and the example weighs the same lines both ways to say what that saves.

Whatever program a reader opens a document in has to be able to draw fourteen faces of its own, whether the file brings them or not — Helvetica, Times, Courier and Symbol are four of them. A document that asks for one of those writes a few lines naming it and nothing else: not one letter travels with the file. This page is set in those four, accents and mathematical signs included, and opens the same everywhere.

The example does not claim the saving, it measures it: it lays the same four lines out twice, once this way and once with a font carried inside, and writes both figures on the page it drew. What it costs is written there too. A file that claims an archiving or accessibility standard may not do this — those standards want every font carried, and the library refuses to write such a file — and each of these faces draws only the 256 characters its own encoding reaches, so a writing system outside that needs a font the file really brings.

What this example shows

• Four faces every reader draws itself: Helvetica, Times, Courier and Symbol.
• No font in the file, and both weights measured by the program.
• What it costs: no archiving or accessibility standard, and 256 characters a face.

The code, in full

The same document is written twice, once in each language. Both files are shown in full, with the code coloured on the server, and can be copied in one click.

The document itself

The same document is written in each of these languages. Open the one you want to look at.

Open the document in English Open the document in French

Read the Rust source Read the Python source

What this document weighs

This document weighs 6,349 bytes.

The team wrote this example after measuring the documents above, so there is no earlier figure to set beside it. See every document measured.