I’ve noticed that when exporting a PDF with Handwriting Recognition enabled in GoodNotes, the file size becomes significantly larger if the Recognition Language is set to Japanese and includes handwritten Japanese text. In many cases, the file size increases by more than five times, depending on the document content.

For comparison, when I scan a Japanese document using a document scanner and apply OCR with Adobe Acrobat (Windows version), the resulting PDF file size does not increase as drastically. This suggests that the file size issue when adding transparent Japanese text to PDFs may not be unavoidable.

I believe the excessive size might be due to inefficient font subsetting, especially given that CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters often require larger font files than English text. When I analyzed the file size in Adobe Acrobat, I found that fonts accounted for about 74% of the total file size, which likely contributes to this issue.

It would be ideal if PDFs exported with Japanese handwriting recognition were optimized to reduce file size, particularly by addressing font subsetting methods for CJK characters.