[pdftex] Pdftex corrupts included pdf images

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Marco Bosch wrote:

> I'm writing my thesis with pdftex and everythings works smoothly except the
> inclusion of some scanned pictures and png files. I've converted these
> files to
> eps files and used epstopdf to convert them to pdf files. The files look

pdfTeX can use png files directly. Omit the extension of
your image file and the graphics package will use eps
for LaTeX/dvips and png for pdfTeX.

> perfectly
> if viewed with acroread. However, when I include them in my document with
> \includegraphics, some images look like negatives of what they are
> intended to
> be (and furthermore, they are distorted).

* Update ghostscript >= 6.01
* Update pdfTeX >= 0.14 or 1.00a pretest

> I've read that this problem has come up before and the suggestion was to
> upgrade
> to a newer version of pdftex. However, I do not want to upgrade my
> version of pdftex
> at the moment.

Then you have to live with the old bugs.
The only workaround is to use png instead of pdf.

> The risk of something going wrong and screwing up my
> whole tex
> system seems to be too big at the moment.

There is an image of the TeXLive 6 available on CTAN.
You can download it and can use the uncompressed
(bzip2/bunzip2) image mounted as loopback device
under Linux or run it burned on a CD directly
from CD for Windows. In both cases the old Installation
remains untouched.  For running you need only some
environment variable settings (PATH, VARTEXMF).
But this can be done in a separate shell.

> I know that I can include the files directly as a png file with
> \pdfimage. However,
> I also want to use normal latex on the file.

\includegraphics{image} first looks for image.png if
pdfTeX is running.

Viele Gruesse
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>