[pdftex] errors from AR caused by color package

Ben Crowell pdftexcrowell04 at lightandmatter.com
Sat May 22 17:06:32 CEST 2004


I have some books that use the color package to make some
rules and display text come out in gray rather than black.
They had always compiled fine in pdflatex, and I was able
to view and print them in Acrobat Reader 5.0. The guy who
does my printing for me had no trouble outputting them.

Recently I heard from a reader who downloaded one of the books
from my web page, and found that he couldn't view certain
pages with Acrobat Reader 5.0. I normally view them in xpdf,
but I went ahead and checked with Acrobat Reader 5.0.5, and
sure enough, I got errors on all the same pages he did. The
errors occurred on every page in which I used gray:

  There was an error processing a page. Wrong number of
  arguments for a setcolor operator.

  An unrecognized token 'gray' was found.

I was able to work around the problem simply by getting rid
of all the \color{...} commands, but I'd like to figure out
what's going on here. The broken version is here
  http://www.lightandmatter.com/bk6bad.pdf   ,
and the new version is here:
  http://www.lightandmatter.com/bk6.pdf   .
The error in the broken version can be produced by going to
page 66. The source code for the book is available here:
  http://www.lightandmatter.com/area1book6.html#download
(This is the source code for the broken version, i.e., with
the \color commands still in it.)

I tried to make a minimal example like this:
  \documentclass{book}
  \RequirePackage{color}
  \begin{document}
  \definecolor{foo}{gray}{.5}
  {\Huge black {\color{foo} gray}}
  \end{document}
When I compiled it with pdflatex, I noticed that it was producing
this error message:
  Non-PDF special ignored!
The resulting output file does not cause an error in Acrobat
Reader, but the text doesn't come out in gray, either.

Can anyone help me figure out what's going on? TIA!



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