dumping an image in pdf mode is rather difficult to get right. If in dvi mode an image is "stored" by a reference to an external file, then I am afraid the speed gain is not that much. There is for sure some comfort by having a dumped file reference in the format, but again that can be also achieved for pdf mode using some macros IMHO. My vote is also to disable \pdfrefximage and the likes in init mode. Thanh On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 03:24:28PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
This is the first user complaining in years (it has always been broken). I don't forsee many people complaining if we disable it. How many people do you know that do \includegraphics in the ini?
Disabling \pdfximage is easy, enabling it is probably much harder (Taco is investigating that), and only very few users need it (the ones raising the bug don't really unless pdfTeX dumps the complete image in the format; meta-infos won't be enough).
In DVI mode, the dumped meta-info in the special _is_ enough. It is not expected that the actual contents of included files make it into hlists/vlists or even the DVI file. If external references break when moving a format around in the tree or changing the referenced files, nobody will be very much surprised. PDFTeX should likely try to avoid crashing or acting all too unpredictable, but that's more or less all. It would seem reasonable to not change the reserved space at all in the hlist/vlist, and align the image at the upper left corner of it, regardless of what size it has now.
There is the question of just when to complain when an image source has disappeared. Probably format read time would be correct.