[XeTeX] Odd xelatex / pdflatex behaviour on 64 bit systems

David Cottenden d.cottenden at ucl.ac.uk
Fri Feb 12 09:00:14 CET 2010


Hello all,

I have stumbled upon a very odd little piece of behaviour to do with 
including graphics. I would just report it to the package maintainer, 
but it seems to behave differently in some cases between pdflatex and 
xelatex, so...

Here's a snatch of code - line numbers are for my convenience; they are 
obviously removed before compiling!

-----------

1	\documentclass{article}

2	\usepackage{chngpage}
3	\usepackage{graphicx}
4	\usepackage[a0paper,top=0pt,bottom=1in,left=1in,right=1in]{geometry}
5	%\usepackage[a0paper,top=0pt,bottom=1in,left=0in,right=0in]{geometry}

6	\begin{document}
7	\adjustwidth{-1in}{-1in}%
8	\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth]{img_2799.jpg}
9	\endadjustwidth%
10	\end{document}

----------

If this is run through xelatex or pdflatex on a 32 bits system as is 
then it does what you might expect (any old picture will do - I've used 
several different jpegs and pdfs). On a 64 bit system pdflatex will do 
the trick, but xelatex introduces a translation to the bottom right. 
However, if you pass "draft" to the graphicx package the bounding box is 
shown in the correct position.

Now comment out lines 2, 7, and 9 and uncomment line 5. Naively one 
might think that this would not change the output, but now you get a 
slightly different anomalous translation no matter what you compile with 
or on what platform.

Firstly, is this a known problem? Second, it's not the first time that 
I've encountered a difference in behaviour between the 32 and 64 bits 
versions of xelatex - why do they happen?

I am using TL'09 on an ubuntu linux system (I have installed TL'09 
myself - repositories far too out of date). Further details available on 
request, but there would be way too many at the moment to sent them all!

Hopefully someone can explain...

David


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