[pdftex] Incompatibility between pdfcolmk and multicol

[Hans Ehrbar]

I encountered the following behavior (which seemed
surprising to me) with the small latex file at the end of
this message here: If I run pdflatex version
3.14159-1.00a-pretest-20011114-ojmw (Web2C 7.3.7) from
Debian Woody on this file, I get the error message
``Illegal parameter number in definition of \pec at botcolor.''
If I uncomment the \usepackage[american]{babel} line, the
error message becomes: ``TeX capacity exceeded.''  If I
use the document class ``article'' instead of ``book,'' or
if I omit the section heading, or if I use pdfelatex, the
error disappears.


Hans G. Ehrbar   http://www.econ.utah.edu/ehrbar   ehrbar at econ.utah.edu
Economics Department, University of Utah     (801) 581 7797 (my office)
1645 Campus Center Dr., Rm 308               (801) 581 7481 (econ office)
Salt Lake City    UT 84112-9300              (801) 585 5649 (FAX)

%%%%%%%%%%%%%% beginning of latex file %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\documentclass{book}
%\documentclass{article}

%\usepackage[american]{babel}

\usepackage[pdftex]{color}

\usepackage{multicol}


\usepackage{pdfcolmk}


\begin{document}


\section{Section}



\begin{multicols}{2}

 Text.

\end{multicols}




\end{document}