Bug#501147: /usr/bin/pdftex: pdftex: Incorrect pdf produced from a single correct pdf file
Thank you for the follow-up. Indeed, a useful reply came from Thanh Han
The, which I quote for the records.
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> I join this thread a bit late. Anyway, I find some comments
> interesting:
>
> ,--------
> | On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel@gmx.de> wrote:
> | > the PDF in the attachment of your e-mail contains in object no. 1 a
> | > broken LZW stream (but the RMItd24.pdf is ok.). This can't be forced
> | > (easily) by macro programming, so it could be some bug in the old pdftex
> | > version or its xpdf library used for creating the PDF file. My current
> | > pdftex-1.50.0-alpha here doesn't produce a corrupted PDF.
> `--------
>
> ,--------
> | 2008/10/3 Smg Mailinglist Archive <mlsmg@ulb.ac.be>:
> | > Someone else tried the very same command on his computer, with the
> | > pdftex version 'pdfTeX 3.141592-1.40.3-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.6)', and he got
> | > a correct PDF (although he was also seeing a blank page with my PDF)!
> | > What's going on here?
> `--------
>
> ,--------
> | On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 07:26:22PM +0200, Andreas Matthias wrote:
> | > Actually, this is exactly what he did but it produced a corrupt pdf
> | > on his side. So he contacted me but I could not reproduce it. That's
> | > why I told him to post the above plain TeX example, which is the
> | > smallest possible example I could make that's running perfectly
> | > well on my side but produces a corrupt pdf on his side. Note that
> | > I tried it with exactly the same pdftex version!
> | >
> | > I was curious to know if someone else on this list could reproduce this
> | > problem. Olivier is running Debian and I know that there are other
> | > people running Debian on this list.
> `--------
>
> I asked Olivier for a copy of his pdftex binary, and
> ldd shows that the binary is indeed linked against libpoppler.
>
> To verify, I installed debian lenny and texlive using
> apt-get (that's Olivier's platform), and built pdftex 1.40.3 on
> from sources that platform. The "stock" pdftex gave the same
> problem as described here, and pdftex built from sources
> works fine. So, this seems to be a distro-specific problem.
>
> This "xpdf vs libpoppler" story is already known to most of
> us. Those who want to know more about this can do a google
> search on "pdftex xpdf libpoppler".
>
> Regards,
> Thanh
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To make it short: it seems that the problem is distro-specific, as
pdftex built from source (and using xpdf) works while the
Debian-packaged pdftex (using libpoppler) shows the bug. And thus, the
problem MIGHT come from libpoppler, that being the most obvious
difference between these two pdftex programs.
This bug might thus be closed, waiting for a more recent libpoppler
version, but I'm afraid that in this case this bug report (containing
useful informations) will be lost if that does not solve the problem
(which I suspect will be the case), and someone else will have to spend
hours searching for the problem and filing the same bug report again...
I rather suggest to leave this bug open until it clearly appears that it
can't be reproduced using a more recent version. I gave a very easy way
to try to reproduce the problem...
Olivier
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