xpdf 4.06 crashes pdflatex

[Bruno Voisin]

> Norbert Preining wrote:
> 
> > xpdf update from 4.05 to 4.06 crashes pdflatex
> > texlive-2023-80.fc44.src.rpm on fedora
> 
> The binaries we provide have xpdf statically compiled in.
> 
> If fedora does something else, and it seems that xpdf 4.06 did an
> incompatible change, then fedora needs to recompile the binaries.


I had no idea pdfTeX used xpdf as a lib. Looking at the TL source, indeed it does. As you say, on the Mac pdfTeX must be linked statically to xpdf, as the only shared libraries are libSystem and libc++:

% otool -L `which pdftex`
/Library/TeX/texbin/pdftex (architecture x86_64):
	/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 400.9.4)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1252.250.1)
/Library/TeX/texbin/pdftex (architecture arm64):
	/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1200.3.0)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1311.0.0)

I noticed a few days ago xpdf had been updated to 4.06. As far as I cant tell the precompiled Mac binaries (tested with pdfinfo, pdffonts, pdftops) work fine. By the way, it seems TL uses xpdf 4.04, reverted from 4.05 in February 2024.

On my setup ExecutionFlow.tex from <https://arxiv.org/src/2511.01471> builds just fine. Looking at the report

https://forum.xpdfreader.com/viewtopic.php?t=45365

it appears all of

BuiltinFont.cc
BuiltinFont.h
BuiltinFontTables.cc

are unchanged between xpdf 4.05 and 4.06. So the problem must be elsewhere. Based on some googling, the error

Fatal glibc error: malloc.c:2578 (sysmalloc): assertion failed: (old_top == initial_top (av) && old_size == 0) || ((unsigned long) (old_size) >= MINSIZE && prev_inuse (old_top) && ((unsigned long) old_end & (pagesize - 1)) == 0)

evokes a pointer assertion failure. Here I'll stop, as I'm way out of my depth.

The only vaguely related indication I noticed among the 4.06 changes is

On Linux systems (and anything else that uses fontconfig) look for the
  Base-14 fonts under the newer Nimbus names via fontconfig (in
  addition to checking for the older gs font names in 'standard'
  directories).

Bruno Voisin