This reminds me of my first programming job in 2005, working with Macromedia Flash. They had one other Flash programmer who only worked there every once in a while because he was actually studying in college, and he was working on some kind of project from hell that, among other problems, took about two minutes to build to SWF.
Eventually they stopped asking him to come because he couldn't get anything done, and so I had a look at it. In the Movie Clip library of the project I found he had an empty text field somewhere that was configured to include a copy of almost the entire Unicode range, including thousands of CJK characters, so each time you built the SWF it would collect and compress numerous different scripts from different fonts as vectors for use by the program. And it wasn't even being used by anything.
Once I removed that one empty text field, builds went down to about ~3 seconds.
Yep. In order to use non-standard fonts in Flash I recall you had to embed the fonts, even if the movie clip containing the textfield was not being used anywhere.
Eventually they stopped asking him to come because he couldn't get anything done, and so I had a look at it. In the Movie Clip library of the project I found he had an empty text field somewhere that was configured to include a copy of almost the entire Unicode range, including thousands of CJK characters, so each time you built the SWF it would collect and compress numerous different scripts from different fonts as vectors for use by the program. And it wasn't even being used by anything.
Once I removed that one empty text field, builds went down to about ~3 seconds.