[pdftex] redundant objects with includegraphics

[Otfried Cheong]

 > In any case, 'pdftex.def' does not currently seem to have support
 > for including a selected page from a PDF file, and can only include
 > single-page documents (or the first page of multi-page documents).

This was, of course, nonsense - I had been looking at an ancient copy
of 'pdftex.def'.  So, indeed, with my proposed new primitive and
change of \pdfximage semantics, one could write:

       \includegraphics[page=1]{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=2]{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=3]{a.pdf}
       
which might duplicate resources in the PDF output, but would not
include unused resources.  On the other hand, one could write
	
       \pdfembed{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=1]{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=2]{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=3]{a.pdf}
	
which would include all resources from a.pdf in the PDF output,
without duplication, but may create unused resources.

I suppose it would be nice to have

       \pdfembed pages 1 3 {a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=1]{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=2]{a.pdf}
       \includegraphics[page=3]{a.pdf}

which would include exactly the necessary resources.

For the moment, however, I don't think I want to do this

       \pdfembed pages 1-3,5,17-42,59,66-78 {a.pdf}

yet :-)

Otfried