[pdftex] Incompatibility between pdfcolmk and multicol

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Heiko Oberdiek wrote:

> 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.

I have taken a short look at the problem:
Package multicol is not supported by pdfcolmk.
A fix is not trivial. If I find some time I
will try it. In order to save a lot of time
and problems I will only support a fix
that uses the e-TeX features. Because
pdfetex comes with pdftex, this should
be no problem for the user.

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