[pdftex] PDF v1.4 support in PDFTeX v1.10b

[Ulrich Dirr]

I'm just evaluating if an update to v1.10b of PDFTeX will cause any
problems in my environment.

In NEWS you write:
- Currently the Page Group attribute (see sections 7.3.6 and 7.5.5 of 
  the pdf 1.4 reference) of included pdfs is NOT copied (as we don't 
  know how to handle this when imposing pdfs). 
      This means including pdfs with transparency features will work as 
  long as the included pdf doesn't use Page Groups; if it does, the 
  result might not be what is expected (One application known to use 
  Page Groups is Adobe Illustrator v9++). The distributed pdfTeX 
  binaries will give a warning about any occurance of a Page Group in an

  included pdf and ignore the Page Group (thus producing syntactically 
  correct pdfs but probably not the intended output).  
      Acrobat 5++ and newer versions of Jaws display files without Page 
  Groups correctly, so this might not really be a problem.  
      See pdftoepdf.cc for preprocessor flags which allow this behaviour

  to be changed (copying the Page Group (most likely producing incorrect

  pdf) or treating Page Groups as errors).

Does anyone have experiences with included Illustrator files with
transparencies on imagesetters?

I guess pictures containing DeviceN color space or smooth shading are
not touched at all.

Ulrich Dirr