Re: [NTG-pdftex] images in formats

"Martin Schröder" writes:

2007/6/27, David Kastrup :

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Taco Hoekwater writes:

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A very quick, fast, and non-crashing solution is to disable setting \pdfoutput to non-zero in initex mode :-)

No, because that get's dumped and the pdf*-formats (like pdflatex.ini) set it.

My experience from the time when there was a pdftex.cfg around was that this overrode the value of \pdfoutput in the dumped format. Is this still similar, or has this changed.

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So, that leaves two options: bluntly disabling \pdfrefximage et.al. in ini mode, or adding dump/undump code for those arrays. It would not be a very invasive patch, and that has my preference.

What do you think?

That's exactly what I propose to do: Disable \pdfximage and other commands (like \pdfxform and \pdfobj) that cause problems in ini mode.

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So it is is feasible, my vote would be on dumping the required arrays.

It's not easily done; a patch would be welcomed, but be warned that this is _hard_.

I would not volunteer for further patches until I have managed to find the time to do the already promised ones. I was not sure what solution Taco had been referring to with his "not be a very invasive patch" comment above. It sounded like dump/undump, and if that would be feasible, I still think it the best idea not to make iniTeX less capable than necessary. For example, preview-latex uses mylatex.ltx to dump the state of the TeX at \begin{document} time. Not allowing any image references (like in \savebox commands) before that point of time is a rather brutal restriction.

And I seriously doubt that luaTeX needs it.

Actually, the current "dump core if hyphenation in iniTeX is attempted" inheritage from Aleph is likely even worse as an iniTeX restriction. But this is IIRC slated to get fixed (doing hyphenation on utf-8 rather than ucs-16 might help). And the image problem is a similar ball park concerning its undesirability. Again: the \AtBeginDvi command was added to LaTeX precisely in order to conserve pretypeset stuff that would otherwise get lost at a format dump. -- David Kastrup