[pdftex] Acrobat Reader 4.0 bug, incompatible with pdftex?

Ben Crowell crowell01 at lightandmatter.com
Sat Sep 1 15:02:36 CEST 2001


Tom Kacvinsky wrote:
>I took a look at simple.pdf, using Acrobat 4.0.5 for Macintosh.  I did not
>see the problems you were talking about.  Are you trying this on Windows?

There's a long list of examples in my series of posts on comp.text.tex.
The only regular pattern I found is that it never occurred with AR5.0,
and sometimes (not always) occurred with AR4.0 and lower.

I run MacOS myself, and I just checked in AR4.0, running in Classic mode
under MacOS X. I'm not using the plug-in, just the application, and
the bug does occur, although not for every figure with embedded text.
For instance, figure b on p. 198 shows only a 0 label on the y axis,
not the other two labels.

Maybe
(a) You do get the bug, but didn't check enough figures to see one
where it occurs?
(b) You're running 4.0.5 and I'm running 4.0.foo with foo<5? (Mine
just says 4.0, so I don't know what foo is.)
(c) Maybe you're running MacOS 9? Some
of my tests did show that it acted differently on different
operating systems.

The problem is hard to get a handle on, because the garbling
is different depending on what OS and AR version you're running
(see my data on comp.text.tex).
My guess is that it's some kind of dangling pointer bug. This would
explain why the results are so hard to reproduce -- it just depends
on what garbage there is where the pointer points.




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