[XeTeX] Weird Behavior

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Wed Oct 19 14:39:55 CEST 2005


Le 19 oct. 05 à 14:11, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> On 19 Oct 2005, at 12:59 pm, nachman wrote:
>
>> I seem to have developed a persistent problem:  sometime  
>> typesetting use xelatex produces garbage in the pdf file.   
>> Typesetting the same material again (sometimes several times)  
>> produces the correct result.
>>
>> Has anybody seen this problem?  Any ideas?
>
> I'm puzzled why typesetting several times would change the result.  
> But try the just-released 0.98 update, which fixes a serious PDF- 
> generation bug that could definitely produce garbage, and see if  
> that helps.

Might be unrelated to XeTeX, and related instead to a PDF rendering  
bug in Tiger: sometimes, when displaying "quickly" a PDF file, or  
printing "quickly" an ASCII document, the output contains  
interchanged glyphs (for example all spaces replaced by ")", """ or  
";", or numbers replaced by a combination of numbers and punctuation  
signs).

It looks like an encoding problem, as if some glyphs were displaced  
by some units in the encoding table. I've seen this when viewing PDF  
files in Preview or TeXShop, or printing ASCII messages in Mail (in  
this case the problem appears in the printed output).

I'm unsure what triggers this. My impression is that this appears  
when things are done "quickly": when a message is printed as soon  
it's displayed, or a PDF window is selected immediately after its  
content is updated. Which makes me think it's connected with  
Spotlight indexing.

In any case, the factor yielding correct output would not be, with  
XeTeX, a new typeset, but simply updating the PDF view (for example,  
in TeXShop, closing the PDF window then opening it again). Is this  
the case?

Bruno Voisin



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