[pdftex] Incorrect pdf produced from a single correct pdf file

[Thanh Han The]

Hi,

I join this thread a bit late. Anyway, I find some comments
interesting:

,--------
| On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel at gmx.de> wrote:
| > the PDF in the attachment of your e-mail contains in object no. 1 a
| > broken LZW stream (but the RMItd24.pdf is ok.). This can't be forced
| > (easily) by macro programming, so it could be some bug in the old pdftex
| > version or its xpdf library used for creating the PDF file. My current
| > pdftex-1.50.0-alpha here doesn't produce a corrupted PDF.
`--------

,--------
| 2008/10/3 Smg Mailinglist Archive <mlsmg at ulb.ac.be>:
| > Someone else tried the very same command on his computer, with the
| > pdftex version 'pdfTeX 3.141592-1.40.3-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.6)', and he got
| > a correct PDF (although he was also seeing a blank page with my PDF)!
| > What's going on here?
`--------

,--------
| On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 07:26:22PM +0200, Andreas Matthias wrote:
| > Actually, this is exactly what he did but it produced a corrupt pdf
| > on his side. So he contacted me but I could not reproduce it. That's
| > why I told him to post the above plain TeX example, which is the
| > smallest possible example I could make that's running perfectly
| > well on my side but produces a corrupt pdf on his side. Note that
| > I tried it with exactly the same pdftex version!
| >
| > I was curious to know if someone else on this list could reproduce this
| > problem. Olivier is running Debian and I know that there are other
| > people running Debian on this list.
`--------

I asked Olivier for a copy of his pdftex binary, and
ldd shows that the binary is indeed linked against libpoppler.

To verify, I installed debian lenny and texlive using
apt-get (that's Olivier's platform), and built pdftex 1.40.3 on
from sources that platform. The "stock" pdftex gave the same
problem as described here, and pdftex built from sources
works fine. So, this seems to be a distro-specific problem.

This "xpdf vs libpoppler" story is already known to most of
us. Those who want to know more about this can do a google
search on "pdftex xpdf libpoppler".

Regards,
Thanh