Week 10 + Week 11: Subsetting for freetext annotations is merged

Wednesday, 26 August 2026  |  Ojas Maheshwari

Hello fellow KDE contributors and users!

The Font Subsetting for FreeText annotations merge request got merged today and this means Poppler now supports font subsetting for FreeText annotations.

You can try it out by using Poppler from the master branch or wait for the next release. You can enable/disable it by passing -DENABLE_HARFBUZZ=ON/OFF when running CMake although it is enabled by default.

We worked on the following in the past 2 weeks,

  • Re-generating the CIDToGIDMap after subsetting.
  • Re-generating the width array after subsetting.
  • Working on code reviews on the MR.
  • Regression testing and fixing bugs.
  • Some small architectural code changes.

What's remaining:

  • The Font Subsetting for Form Fields merge request is under review and is currently being regression tested for bugs. After this is merged, font subsetting shall be fully supported in Poppler.

Watch out for a demo video/blog showcasing the results after doing font subsetting soon!

Thank you,
Ojas