[pdftex] pdftex core dump when including certain pdf files

[Andre Wobst]

Hi,

We recently got told by a PyX user, that recent versions of pdftex (in our
tests on Ubuntu 16.04) core dumps when embedding certain PDF files. An example
is attached to the bug report
https://sourceforge.net/p/pyx/mailman/message/35118842/

We investigated in detail what causes the issue and found out that this
happens when the font descriptors contain non-integer values. While usually
those data can be taken from the AFM file, we have a fallback in place (similar
to pdftex) to extract estimated values from the font data directly. For
non-integer values of StemV pdftex core dumps.

In the PDF reference the StemV value is said to be a "number" which are
specified to be either integers or floats.

(In the mean time we applied a patch to PyX to output integer values for the
font descriptor values.)

Note that the issue is not present in an older version of TeX Live on OS X.

Best,


André

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