[tex-live] Correcting pdftex \magnification bug.

Ian Hutchinson ihutch at mit.edu
Sat May 31 23:51:03 CEST 2008


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Since texlive is becoming the default TeX installation for linux (and 
probably the rest of the world!) I want to urge you to fix the 
several-year-old bug in pdftex.ini that leads to an incompatibility 
between pdftex and any plain document that uses \magnification (and that's 
a lot of them).

This bug arises only when producing pdf not when producing dvi. Because 
pdftex uses different page sizing commands, an incorrect offset of 
position is introduced into the pdf output. By replacing the (effectively 
null) pdftex.ini that is currently included in texlive, with the attached 
file, that bug is fixed.

Such corrective action is important because it restores the archival 
integrity of TeX for prior files, as well as removing from authors any 
necessity to take complicated and unnecessary action to obtain correct pdf 
output from Plain TeX.

A thorough discussion of this bug may be found at 
http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/pdftexpatch/ and especially by following the 
link there to the long debate that arose about this problem archived at 
http://www.codecomments.com/Tex/message784423.html. You will note that the 
pdftex programmers' position in that debate is ultimately that fixing this 
is the responsibility of the package maintainers not of the pdftex 
authors.

Hope you agree that this simple fix is worth including in the 
distribution.

 	Ian Hutchinson
 	http://www.psfc.mit.edu/people/hutch/


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