On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 07:16:59PM -0700, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

i'm reporting a problem (found not by me). consider this document:

===================================== \documentclass{article} \usepackage{color} \begin{document}

\makebox[2cm][r]{c}\hspace{-2cm}ab

\makebox[2cm][r]{c}\hspace{-2cm}a\textcolor{red}{b}

\end{document} =====================================

when processed with pdflatex, the generated PDF file is rendered differently by Acrobat Reader 4 and 7 - see the attached files acro4.png and acro7.png.

Acrobat 4's rendering seems to be buggy, but i wonder whether it is a real bug in Acrobat 4 or it is caused by a buggy PDF generated by pdftex?

It's a bug in AR4. See thread `problem of acrobat reader 4.0 or pdftex?' in mailing list `ntg-pdftex' in February 2007. pdftex.def now writes the color directly without ending text blocks and positioning -> "\pdfliteral direct{}" instead of "\pdfliteral{}". Thus the page streams are smaller. The outcome of the thread was that nowadays the people should rather update their AR. You can drop the keyword "direct" by: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{color} \makeatletter \chardef\main@pdfcolorstack=\pdfcolorstackinit page{0 g 0 G}\relax \makeatother "page" doesn't not have same meaning of \pdfliteral's keyword, only the behaviour of "\pdfliteral{}" and "\pdfliteral direct{}" are available for the color stack. I have suggested a new keyword `directpage' for \pdfcolorstackinit to get the behaviour of "\pdfliteral page{}" in the thread, but an answer of the pdfTeX maintainers is still missing. Yours sincerely Heiko --