[XeTeX] First experiences with xetex and some bugs

[Steffen Prohaska]

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Hi,

On Jul 5, 2004, at 9:39 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

>>>> ---+ Bug: Including pdf images
>>>> ---++ Quick Summary
>>>>
>>>> Including certain pdf images breaks font rendering starting with 
>>>> the next page.
>>>> See the attached test document and the output files created using 
>>>> pdflatex and
>>>> xelatex.
>>>>
>>>
>>> This problem seems to occur when using a PDF that was created by 
>>> Quartz, but not with other PDFs such as from Distiller. Any PDF 
>>> experts here who can inspect the test.pdf file and tell us if it is 
>>> somehow invalid? It sounds like there may be a problem with Quartz 
>>> PDF generation; if we can pin down exactly what's wrong, I'll file a 
>>> bug report with Apple.
>>
>> I think you're right. All the pdf documents I encountered problems 
>> with were created by Apple's Preview. I copied stuff to the clipboard 
>> and used 'File - New From Clipboard', to get a pdf document, which I 
>> saved to disk. I didn't have problems with other pdfs which were 
>> created using, e.g. xfig. But nonetheless there should be a way to 
>> deal with theses documents. At least pdftex is able to do so.
>
> Yes, I see that pdfTeX handles them OK. I'm thinking the problem is 
> with the PDF generation through the Quartz graphics, when a page from 
> another PDF document is drawn into the context. I don't see anything 
> further that I can do to try and solve this within my code, as I'm 
> already wrapping the rendering of the embedded PDF with calls to 
> CGContextSaveGState...CGContextRestoreGState. The fact that the 
> particular PDF document drawn then disrupts font rendering on the next 
> page looks like an Apple (Quartz) bug to me.

You can fix the pdf files which break xetex by running them through gs:

	gs -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=good.pdf -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH bad.pdf

Whatever ghostscript does to the files, it fixes the problems :) You 
might also want to add some options, e.g. JPEG compression of the 
images, see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Eghost/doc/cvs/Ps2pdf.htm. At 
least for preview generation.

Currently I'm using:
	gs -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=good.pdf -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH 
- -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dAutoFilterColorImages=false  bad.pdf

Cheers,

	Steffen

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