there are a few places where pdftex takes the current time into account to generate certain tags. Implementing a primitive to leave out date-related things is not difficult. Can you please give some further explain what it would be useful for? Also note that even when such a primitive is available, the chance you get the same output for a given input file is rather low. You need to ensure that *all* relevant files (like font-related stuff, macro, figure etc.) are also the same. Thanh On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 02:07:16PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
Hi,
we (i.e. a couple of Debian developers, taking up old ideas of each individual and the tests in http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/support/tests/) are trying to implement some automated testing of pdf and dvi creation by pdftex. Possible applications are regression tests for the binary, for distributions (changed font setup etc.), or for package authors ("does the new version still cooperate with hyperref?").
For this, it would be great if it were possible to create identical pdf files in subsequent runs of pdfTeX. With
\pdfinfo{/CreationDate (1980-09-09)} \year=1980 \month=9 \day=9 \time=10 \pdfcompresslevel0
I get pdf files that can be compared, but only after some grepping:
egrep -a -v '/BaseFont|/FontName|/UniqueID|/ID|/CreationDate' $< > $@
With dvipdfmx (and perhaps with newer pdfTeX versions than the one in teTeX) /CMap or something like this needs to be excluded, too.
Is it possible to achieve identical pdf files directly, by adding the proper commands, or would it be possible to add this feature?
TIA, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
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