Just be aware that if you xref a file with a lot of TTF text, the resulting drawing will become EXTREMELY slow to open. We have had some take as much as an hour to open due to the number of xrefs that had TTF fonts in them, we changed them to SHX in all of the xRefs and the same file opened in under a minute. ....
That's good to know (again). I made this experience 15 years ago (Acad 14, 2000), but since this time I did not use such big files again. In the meantime I thought this issue is solved - better integration in OS, high-speed machines and so on.
So I'm surprised the issue still exists.
...Here is the thread that I had asking about changing TTF fonts to SHX fonts through LISP:...
Yes, I think my next steps will investigate in the results above: mapping, font changing, ...
...If you want the text to be searchable though, you can use Bluebeam Extreme as your PDF reader and use the OCR feature, I find that it is extremely accurate and very fast. You can find more details about it at: http://bluebeam.com/us/products/revu/extreme.asp ...
I made only quick tests with OCR inside the "PDFXChange-Viewer". I saw that it works fine on newspapers and old typewriter-text, but with new created PDFs using ISOCP.shx it has problems to distinguish "1 l t f I ..."
But I'm aware that OCR is a science and not "click to button - done" solution.
Peter