Hello,
The good news is that I solved the direct problem found by Murali on the
PDF front (and fix is on the update server). (Well, I also fixed another
unrelated bug whereby if you said "no" to overwriting a pdf/ps file you
got an exception.)
The bad news is that pstoedit just falls over a line later.
I installed ghostscript and pstoedit and found that the error Murali found
was output from postscript. So it seems that ghostscript is using
postscript to parse the PDF file (unbelievable, but what the heck). And
debugging postscript is even harder than debugging anything else. But
eventually I figured out that what it was complaining about had nothing to
do with the 20-byte size of the xref table lines, it was because the
number of entries in that table was one more than was being reported
(clever, eh), so it was expecting an "end of table" line and instead found
another entry in the table.
Unfortunately pstoedit is now complaining about an invalid font, i.e.
Times-Roman, but I suspect it would complain about Courier and Helvetica
as well. I found another independent PDF file lying around on my computer
(the Hibernate reference manual) that does pretty much exactly what we do
(except that it uses more variations of the standard fonts). (For some
reason most PDF files fail to use the standard fonts, perhaps because they
are too well-known.) And pstoedit falls over on that file as well, for
the same reason. So my guess is that pstoedit doesn't like these standard
fonts that Adobe says should be guaranteed to exist in any implementation.
(Well, it might be ghostscript that is causing the problem.)
So we are not much better off, although the PDF output should pass through
more (i.e. non-pstoedit) software now.
Wayne
> On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Murali Vadivelu wrote:
>
> > pstoedit -f xfig HSQC_Folded_LF.pdf HSQC_Folded_LF.fig
> > pstoedit: version 3.44 / DLL interface 108 (build Oct 2 2006 -
> > release build - g++ 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5363)) :
> > Copyright (C) 1993 - 2006 Wolfgang Glunz
> > **** Warning: xref subsection header has extra characters.
> > **** Warning: An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
> > **** The file has been damaged. This may have been caused
> > **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.
> > **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.
> >
> > **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
> > **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
> > **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
> > **** specification.
> >
>
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