I'm sorry, but I am not comfortable with releasing these changes for the Type 3 fonts + encoding + Unicode. I realize the features now work in your cases, but I feel much more testing and understanding is needed, before inflicting changes to these low-level routines on the world. I can't undertake this for TL17. The proximate cause is that, in some further testing, I discovered a case that crashed for me now, but did not crash before: \pdfmapline{<} Also, it's unclear to when the new warning "invalid entry for `%s': encoding file for type3 missing" is intended to be given. I could not find any input that caused it. I'm sure that it would not be hard to remedy these particular things, one way or another, but the general principle remains -- I'm simply too uneasy to release these changes, which have grown and grown. As I said before, the primary criterion for pdftex nowadays must be stability. Unfortunately, in that testing, I also discovered other erroneous mapline cases that were already unhandled (before your patches). I know I have not found them all yet. Sigh. If Thanh or Martin wants to include these changes in the upcoming release, and can help with testing/code review, then that is fine. Otherwise, it will have to wait for another time. For the present, I have reverted the changes in the TL repository. (Hopefully correctly.) At least you have written the code now, so can compile your own pdftex and use it for your own work ... --sorry, karl.