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I teach political economy and statistics at a large public university in the US. You can find my academic website here.

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computing · January 3, 2012 · comments

Workaround for PPower4 error under MacTeX
using PDF version 1.5

by Chris Adolph

PPower4 is an elegant but no-longer maintained post-processor for LaTeX slides that replicates the essential features of PowerPoint. The beamer class has largely replaced PPower4, but for those of us with lots of legacy PPower4 slides to maintain, or who simply like PPower4 for certain tasks,* here is a workaround for an annoying bug.

If you try to use PPower4 to process a pdf file made with a recent version of MacTeX, you’ll get an error like this one:

This is PPower4 version 0.9.4.
de.tu_darmstadt.sp.paul.PDFParserException: Encountered "838" at line 0, column 2536948.
Was expecting:
  "xref" ...

Why happening!? MacTeX now outputs pdf version 1.5, which has extensions that PPower4 doesn’t know how to parse and is unlikely to ever be able to handle.

Make better! Just add \usepackage{pdf14} to the preamble of your LaTeX document. I offer no guarantees or additional support, but it worked for me.

help

*I still use PPower4 for graduate lecture slides. The light backgrounds and assorted chrome on beamer are nifty in short presentations, but if I had to stare at beamer slides for three hours straight every day, I think I’d scratch my eyes out.


tags: technical

Comment on PPower4 PDF Workaround.


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