[pdftex] Double MediaBox in pdflatex output

[Heiko Oberdiek]

Hello,

On 2017-02-09 13:19, Altmann, Michael wrote:
>
> when preparing PDF files for a printing house, a bleed box has to be
> included in the file, and the media box has to be increased
> appropriately. If I supply a custom MediaBox with \pdfpageattr, the
> MediaBox appears twice in the pdf output. It is easy to remove one
> MediaBox manually, but this is error prone.

pdfTeX only allows some control over the upper right corner of
the media box via `\pdfpagewidth` and `\pdfpageheight` (plus/minus
rounding issues). The lower left corner is always fixed at zero.

The workaround is to increase the output page, move the page
contents accordingly, and to recalculate the coordinates of
the other boxes. Then, the media box, written by pdfTeX,
is correct without the need to specify a second one.

Yours sincerely
   Heiko Oberdiek