[pdftex] redundant objects with includegraphics

[Andreas Matthias]

From: "Otfried Cheong" <otfried at cs.uu.nl>

> If one were really ambitious, one could extend my suggestion to a
> format that would handle arbitrary subsets of pages, such as:
> 
> \pdfximage page 17 {a.pdf}
> \pdfximage page 17-42 {a.pdf}
> \pdfximage page 1-12,24,40-42 {a.pdf}
> \pdfximage page * {a.pdf}

[...]

> My suggested extension to \pdfximage can be implemented with very
> little effort.  In fact, I just looked at the pdftex sources and found
> that the suggested command "\pdflastximagepages" to retrieve the number
> of pages in an included PDF file already exists!  It works fine on
> 14h-pretest-20010310, but is not yet in the pdftex manual.
> 
> So, if people agree that my suggested extension to \pdfximage is
> useful, and nobody more qualified takes it up, I will go and try to
> implement it in pdftex.  I guess I could do this in a day, while a
> postprocessor looks a bit more work :-)

This would be great. But IMHO this is just the first step. The
second would be to find someone to include your extensions
in `pdftex.def' (`graphicx.sty'), so that we don't lose the
wonderful things that \includegraphics can do (trim, clip, rotate,...).
How much effort would it require to do that? 

Best regards,
Andreas