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pdfghostscript
MandyShaw
MandyShaw

Reputation: 1146

Ghostscript pdfwrite produces zero length output when reading from PDF files, no error reported, fine with other inputs

I have a requirement to append one PDF file to another.

I felt that Ghostscript was the way forward, and installed the 64 bit Windows version (9.53.0), but if I attempt to do anything with pdfwrite where the input is a PDF, e.g.

gswin64c -DNOSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o output.pdf input.pdf

I get zero length output (with no error messages at all). This happens whether the PDF is one of Ghostscript's shipped examples, one generated using tcpdf, or one saved from a Windows application. It happens whether I try to read from a single PDF or from multiple ones (the latter being my use case).

If I convert the input PDFs to Postscript and then use pdfwrite on those, it works like a dream, e.g.

call pdf2ps input.pdf temp.ps
gswin64c -DNOSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o output.pdf temp.ps

EPS inputs work fine also - the only problem seems to be with PDF ones. But Ghostscript can read and display any PDF (and indeed convert any PDF to Postscript), it just can't cope with PDFs as input to pdfwrite, as far as I can see.

I can find no reference anywhere to this particular issue.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 501

Answers (1)

KenS
KenS

Reputation: 31141

This turned out to not be limited to PDF input, it's just easier to trigger it that way. The problem was that an internal data type was changed from a build-dependent size to always be 64-bits, but a #define'd value wasn't correctly updated so the 64-bit Windows build was still using a value intended for 32-bit builds.

There's a commit to fix the problem here. However this seems serious enough that a new build 9.53.1 (so that's patch level 1 already...) will be forthcoming shortly (if it's not already there).

It would help a lot if people could report bugs when they find this kind of problem, and even better if there are any volunteers to try out the release candidates, we would really prefer not to make releases with serious problems.....

Upvotes: 2

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