Re: [NTG-pdftex] Creating identical PDF files with different pdfTeX runs

...

...

...

...

"Frank" == Frank Küster writes:

Is it possible to achieve identical pdf files directly, by adding the proper commands, or would it be possible to add this feature?

This would be useful for package authors who want to compare the output of different versions of their macro packages using the same version of pdftex. If you want to compare different versions of pdftex, your tests will hopefully always fail and it is sufficient to compare file sizes. For some time Hartmut is trying to convince pdftex to produce significantly smaller pdf files, especially if font expansion is used. The current version includes the same font with a modified FontMatrix for each expasion factor, while the next version will embed each font only once. There are a few other things which will not provide such a large improvement and hence might be postponed for future versions. As an example, the width of glyphs can be specified by setting a variable or by providing an array. pdftex always provides arrays but for monospaced fonts it is sufficient to set the variable and omit the array. Comparing bitmaps, as some people already suggested, is a good thing. It shouldn't be too difficult to write a script which produces a bitmap file for each page (using ghostscript) and then creates a file which consists of lines like <pagenumber> <md5sum of the bitmap file> The bitmap files can be removed by the script when it is finished and standard UNIX tools can be used to examine the output files. Particularly, diff(1) can be used efficiently. It will tell you the numbers of the pages which are different. However, it would be nice if the pdftex version number could be retrieved more easily. At the moment the options "-v" and "--version" are both quite verbose and provide copyright stuff. Maybe one of these options should provide the pdftex version ("1.30.7-beta" for example) only and nothing else. A script might want to insert the pdftex version number into its output filename, but at the moment it can only be done using something like sed|awk|perl. And maybe the output of pdftex {-v,--version} will change in the future, which will break such scripts. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------