[tex-live] pdftex LFS bug: on mac too?

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 6:39 AM, Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com> wrote:

> On  11 Sep, 2008, at 18:23, Karl Berry wrote:
>
>>   Is the bug supposed to affect the inclusion of any pdf, then?
>>
>> It doesn't do that.
> [...]
> Maybe I don't understand what's going on, but I have both a Mac PPC system
> (dual processor G5, 2GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 8.64GB of free disk space) and a Mac
> Intel laptop. I just tried typesetting a book done originally in 2006 with
> gwTeX (which I no longer have).
>
> This book uses more than 100 images; the heaviest PDF is 25MB file (as
> converted by Ghostscript 8.62; PDF press-ready by Adobe Distiller, just
> 11MB), from a 70MB Illustrator EPS.

Were you using pdf(la)tex with pdf figures, or (la)tex with EPS figures and
then dvips?

> Both Ghostscript *and Apple Distiller* had problems with some (about 15)
> Photoshop EPS files (but not Illustrator or generic EPS files), so I used
> Adobe Distiller to distill those. This problem was both on PPC and Intel,
> exactly with the same images.

Last week I formatted an article (originally formated on Win32) using
OSX Intel ,TL2008 latex+dvips, and Adobe Distiller (CS3).   Distiller had
problems with many of the EPS figures, as did Apple's Preview.app (for
the non-Apple users, Preview is a pdf viewer, and uses an Apple
"distiller" to convert EPS to PDF).

The figures that caused problems were originally saved from Adobe
Illustrator CS2 on Win32.   I had to reload the .ai files and save again
with the degree symbol converted to outline path.    While there were
no Photoshop EPS files, many of the Illustrator files have embedded
Photoshop images, so may well share problems with Photoshop EPS.
There were also figures prepared using CMYK EPS on unix Matlab.  They
did not cause any problems.

> I don't recall this happening in the past; but anyway it wasn't a pdfTeX
> problem, but Ghostscript and Apple Distiller with Photoshop EPS.

I was quite surprised -- we have many EPS files created with AI and
PS dating back years that have never caused problems.

In addition to font problems, I suspect there may be problems with
the different newline conventions.  Some of the EPS files that gs
couldn't render were rendered with incorrect fonts after a "flip -u" to
convert from MS-DOS to unix newlines.

I'm pretty sure all this is not a TeX bug, but it is TeX that will
be blamed when there are problems.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia