[XeTeX] xdvipdfmx doesn't seem to respect PDF crop areas

[Jonathan Kew]

On 22 Sep 2006, at 7:39 am, Zachary Pincus wrote:

>>> Unfortunately, when I use xelatex with the xdvipdfmx driver, the  
>>> crop
>>> area is not respected for the PDF figures included with
>>> \includegraphics or with \XeTeXpdffile. If I use "regular"  
>>> xelatex or
>>> plain latex, things work fine.
>>
>> What happens if you use dvipdfm.def instead of xetex.def
>> by writing as
>> \usepackage[dvipdfm]{graphicx}
>> \usepackage[dvipdfm, ...]{hyperref}
>> and creating .bb file for each pdf by
>> ebb -c foo.pdf
>> before compiling by xelatex.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion.
>
> I'll let you know how this goes as soon as I get a new ebb compiled.
> (There are some dependencies that I don't have... No kpathsea library
> from the i-installer (OS X tex package) version of tex,

It's probably in /usr/local/teTeX/lib; I haven't looked at the ebb  
sources, but you may be able to give a configure option to locate it,  
something like --with-kpathsea=/usr/local/teTeX. If there isn't a  
suitable configure option, then setting -I and -L options in CFLAGS  
and LDFLAGS may also be a workaround.

> Even if this approach works, am I correct in assuming that this
> constitutes a bug somewhere, or an impedance mismatch between XeTeX
> and xdvipdfmx? ("Normal" XeTeX supports all of the different kinds of
> PDF areas like crop, media, bleed, etc. directly via the
> \XeTeXpdffile command.) I guess my question is: do you think this is
> a temporary workaround, or something that I need to get used to doing
> in order to run XeTeX with xdvipdfmx?

Temporary workaround; xdvipdfmx should handle the pdf boxes directly,  
in the same way as xetex/xdv2pdf. I'll look into it.

JK