I'm of a similar opinion but I'll say the format is quite good, but the many and varied implementations are often not. A common case is clients who use utiliti

I'm of a similar opinion but I'll say the format is quite good, but the many and varied implementations are often not. A common case is clients who use utilities that generate single customer documents then merge them into a bigger file for bulk print and mail (bills and statements, not identical copy). Without fail that results in thousands of similar but different subset fonts whereupon most printers I've encountered eventually fail due to memory issues. Typically this leads to a discussion about "I can open it on my computer fine" and bending over backwards to find a workaround. Merging and consolidating these fonts doesn't seem to be a simple task, although some tools claim to work some of the time. Something that scopes object resources for disposal could be nice in the PDF spec (maybe it exists), but something like a LRU caching mechanism on the printer would potentially resolve this too.