[pdftex] Incompatibility between pdfcolmk and multicol

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Hans Ehrbar wrote:

> 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.

> \usepackage{multicol}
> \usepackage{pdfcolmk}

The use of e-TeX is strongly recommended, because
pdfcolmk can then use a separate mark register.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>