[luatex] pdfpages and lualatex?

[Hartmut Henkel]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, stefano franchi wrote:

> But does anyone know why XeTeX and pdfLaTeX are oblivious to the pdf
> format violation?

good question! No idea about XeTeX, but pdftex uses an xpdf/poppler
function page->getResourceDict() which seems to be intelligent enough to
also search up the Pages tree (if needed) until it finds a Resources
dictionary. Luatex lost this automatism a while ago, an oversight, bug.
It's now back since SVN 4040, with hopefully a slight improvement also:

The downside of pdftex's getResourceDict() function is that it expands
the Resources dictionary during embedding. In particular it does not
keep an originally indirect object indirect (there is no function like
getResourceDictNF(), unfortunately). As a consequence, when pdftex
embeds a PDF page, each new form XObject dictionary contains a full
verbose Resources dictionary, also repeatedly in the resulting PDF if
several pages from one file with the same Resources dict are embedded.
The luatex version now keeps the indirections and embeds a Resources
dict only once, with the potential for slightly smaller PDF files.

Regards, Hartmut