Hi, While working on luatex's \directlua, I ran into a rather interesting bug that affects a number of pdftex primitives as well. Because these do not all have the same author and the needed fix is not identical for all, I thought it easier to write an email message than to try to create a patch myself. The problem: When tex calls `conv_toks()' to execute `convert' commands, a string may already be being built. A call to scan_toks (pdf_scan_ext_toks) at that moment will incorporate that partial string to the argument of the `convert' primitive, and erase it from the output. Example code: \message{\pdfmdfivesum{knuth}} \input knuth\pdfmdfivesum{} \bye Affected primitives: \pdfescapestring \pdfescapename \pdfescapehex \pdfunescapehex \pdffilemoddate \pdffilesize \pdffiledump \pdfmdfivesum \pdfstrcmp The needed fix: Somewhen before calling scan_pdf_ext_toks, you have to store the partial string as a true tex string, then its `partialness' has to be restored sometime later before leaving conv_toks(). Greetings, Taco