[XeTeX] XeTeX quits typesetting with "broken pipe"

[Jonathan Kew]

On 27 Jun 2008, at 8:51 am, Pierre Funck wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm working on a book project with a lot of figures and with OpenType
> fonts loaded via the fontspec package. XeLaTeX (on MacTeX) stops in
> the middle of the typesetting process with the error "broken pipe".
> The precise place where the error occurs is different every time, not
> reproducible. The error doesn't occur when I switch the graphicx
> package to draft mode. (Tried switching to GhostScript instead of
> pdftex with no success.)

The problem is almost certainly a graphic (PDF?) file you're  
including, that xdvipdfmx (the output driver) fails to handle. It  
then quits, and xetex complains "broken pipe" because it has no place  
to send its output any longer. The exact place of failure differs  
because xetex and xdvipdfmx are running in parallel, and the exact  
timing of the xdvipdfmx failure, in relation to xetex's progress,  
will vary.

To narrow down the problem, run your job in two stages:

    xelatex -no-pdf YOUR_FILE_NAME.tex

to generate a .xdv file (extended DVI); this is the formatting stage,  
and I believe it will probably complete the run without problems.  
Then run

    xdvipdfmx -vv -E YOUR_FILE_NAME.xdv

to generate the PDF output from the XDV. The -vv option will give you  
some "verbose" tracing messages to help track its progress. I'm  
expecting that it will report a problem with a PDF file you're  
including, and halt at that point.

The next step depends exactly what problem it's having with the PDF,  
so let's find out what it says, and then go from there.

> The problem only occurs on my MacBook Pro with Mac OS 10.5.2.
> Everything seems to be working fine on my PowerMac G5 Quad with Mac
> OS 10.4.11. So it might be a Leopard incompatibility.

I'm guessing you have different xetex or MacTeX releases on the two  
systems. What does "xetex --version" report on each of them?

JK