[pdftex] pdf inclusion of empty pages

[Andreas Matthias]

I have observed some strange behavior with pdf inclusion.
Pdftex is distressed with completely emtpy pages created
by ps2pdf.
Here are two files exhibiting the problem:


,----[ dummy.tex ]
| \documentclass{minimal}
| \begin{document}
| \mbox{}
| \end{document}
`----

,----[ test.tex ]
| \documentclass{minimal}
| \begin{document}
| \pdfximage{dummy.pdf}
| \pdfrefximage\pdflastximage\mbox{}
| \end{document}
`----


Using pdflatex on both files works as expected:

$ pdflatex dummy
$ pdflatex test

But pdftex is distressed, if dummy.pdf is created via
latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf.

$ latex dummy
$ dvips -o dummy.ps dummy
$ ps2pdf dummy.ps
$ pdflatex test

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-1.00b-pretest-20020211-HO20020802 (Web2C 7.3.7x)
(./test.tex{/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg}
LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, n
ohyphenation, loaded.
(/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf-local/tex/latex/base/minimal.cls
Document Class: minimal 2001/05/25 Standard LaTeX minimal class
) (./test.aux)
Overfull \vbox (226.81001pt too high) has occurred while \output is active
[1 <./dummy.pdf
Error: pdflatex (file ./dummy.pdf): pdf inclusion: invalid page contents type <
null>


Tested with:

  dvips(k) 5.86e
  AFPL Ghostscript 7.03


Ciao
Andreas