Bugzilla #40387: Dealing with IOExceptions for certain large PFM files in a more radical way: load everything into memory, since we basically need random access here. The biggest PFMs I've seen so far are around 20KB so this shouldn't be a big problem, especially as the memory is freed pretty quickly.
xmlgraphics/fop/trunk/src/java/org/apache/fop/fonts/type1/PFMFile.java