<div dir="ltr">I recently upgraded to TeXLive 2020 on Windows 10. I recently noticed that documents that compiled OK under TeXLive 2013 were intermittently failing under TeXLive 2020. In the failure cases, XeTeX only partially generated the PDF file.<div><br></div><div>Investigation revealed that xdvipdfmx was intermittently failing when presented with heavy use of the Batang Korean font, which is a built-in Windows 10 font. Here is a minimal example:</div><div><br></div><div>\font\Korean="Batang" at 10pt<br>\newcount\CrashCount<br>\CrashCount=1<br>\loop\ifnum\CrashCount<4000<br> X {\Korean 서울} X<br> \advance\CrashCount by1<br> \repeat<br>\bye<br></div><div><br></div><div>It is usually necessary to process a file like this several times to trigger the failure. Therefore I wrote a batch job to help with diagnosis:</div><div><br></div><div>@echo off<br>xetex -no-pdf test.tex<br>:LOOPSTART<br>xdvipdfmx test.xdv<br>if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" goto LOOPSTART<br>echo Failed with error %ERRORLEVEL%<br></div><div><br></div><div>The XeTeX log file gives the following error, indicating that xdvipdfmx crashed on an Access Violation:</div><div><br></div><div>Error -1073741819 (driver return code) generating output</div><div><br></div><div>In Windows,
-1073741819 = 0xC0000005 =
Access Violation
</div><div><br></div><div>The version of xdvipdfmx
I am using is 20201111.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I have worked around the issue by putting a retry loop around my call out to xetex in my Python code. Therefore this glitch is not causing me a problem. However, I feel a duty to report it to the (x)dvipdfmx community so that someone can fix it if they feel that doing so is the right thing to do.</div><div><br></div><div>Tim</div></div>