[pdftex] ConTeXt \insertpages problem with 1.00a-pretest-20010806-2.1

[George N. White III]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Hans Hagen wrote:

> At 01:29 PM 12/6/2001 -0400, George N. White III wrote:
> >We have pdfeTeX, Version 3.14159-1.00a-pretest-20010806-2.1, running on
> >SGI Irix.  Some of our students prefer Win32, so we also have 4TeX
> >with many local "enhancements" including current ConTeXt, Perl, and
> >pdf(e)tex running on Win95.
> >
> >On the PC, files "placed" via \insertpages produce blank pages in the
> >output PDF, but the same files work as expected using the Irix version.
> >The Win95 version gives an "unrecognized token" error in acroread 4.05,
> >and the pdf file is somewhat smaller than the version created using the
> >Irix version.
> >
> >I made some simple test files with \pdfcompresslevel=0.  Under Win95, the
> >contents of the placed pages appears to be corrupt.  Before doing anymore
> >testing, it would help to know if anyone else has seen this problem (e.g.,
> >is there something wrong with our configuration or is it a bug in the
> >Win32 binaries?).
>
> Unrecognized tokens have to do with versions, what is the problematic token?

The garbage that was inserted where the contents of the placed pages
should be. I suspect the pdftex binaries I got (from MikTeX) ran afoul of
a .dll version mismatch.  Switching to fptex solved the problem, and
since fptex appears to be based on GNU tools, I am hopeful that it will be
less dependent on .dll's that get installed with other applications.
MikTex can't be installed here because several of the dll's didn't match
the required versions, and we have "department standard" applications that
might break if I install MikTeX's versions.

-- 
George N. White III <gnw3 at acm.org> Bedford Institute of Oceanography