On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:30:40PM +0300, Élie Roux wrote:

[discussion about the use of \pdfprimitive]

Perhaps it becomes clearer, if I quote the pdfTeX manual: | \pdfprimitive control sequence | | This command executes the primitive meaning of the following control | sequence, if it has been redefined or made undefined. If the following | control sequence is undefined and never was a primitive, nothing happens | and no error is raised. If the control sequence was initially expandable, | \pdfprimitive expands either. Otherwise \pdfprimitive doesn't expand. The | primitive has been introduced in pdfTEX 1.40.0. BTW, as you have seen, the second sentence is wrong: \catcode`\{=1 \catcode`\}=2 \ifx\directlua\undefined \else \directlua{tex.enableprimitives('',{'pdfprimitive'})} \fi \pdfprimitive\FooBar \end pdftex -ini: This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009) (INITEX) ... ! Missing primitive name. <to be read again> \FooBar l.7 \pdfprimitive\FooBar luatex -ini: This is LuaTeX, Version beta-0.40.6-2009090421 (TeX Live 2009) (INITEX) ... ! Missing primitive name. <to be read again> \FooBar l.7 \pdfprimitive\FooBar I think, the error message is a good thing, thus the manual should be fixed. (Therefore I have added ntg-pdftex). Also the manual could meantion, that \pdfprimitive was fixed in 1.40.4. Yours sincerely Heiko