# [pdftex] how to crash all pdf viewers with pdflatex

Hartmut Henkel hartmut_henkel at gmx.de
Mon Jul 26 21:47:21 CEST 2004

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 ivo_welch-pdftex at mailblocks.com wrote:

> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{graphicx}
>
> \begin{document}
>     any other text here.
>   \includegraphics[width=0em]{give-a-real-figure's-name-here}
> \end{document}
>
> crashes both xpdf and acrobat as soon as you go to the page where the
> graphic sits.  hope this helps.

It doesn't crash here (pdftex 1.20rc7.1, xpdf 3.00, i686 debian-woody)
but the PDF reference tells in sectin 4.2.3: "Note: When rendering
graphics objects, it is sometimes necessary for a viewer application to
perform the inverse of a transformation---that is, to find the user
space coordinates that correspond to a given pair of device coordinates.
Not all transformations are invertible, however. For example, if a
matrix contains a, b, c, and d elements that are all zero, all user
coordinates map to the same device coordinates and there is no unique
inverse transformation. Such noninvertible transformations are not very
useful and generally arise from unintended operations, such as scaling
by 0. Use of a noninvertible matrix when painting graphics objects can
result in unpredictabe behavior."

and the pdftex output contains the transformation "0 0 0 0 0 0 cm", so
there is a = b = c = d = 0.

Regards, Hartmut

(typos are mine)