Graphics, Figures & Tables ⇒ Beamer error with PDF images

[pmitchell12]

I'm creating a presentation in beamer which incorporates several .pdf image files. I receive the warning "pdf inclusion: found pdf version <1.6> but at most <1.5> allowed". I have gotten this error before when using the thesis document class, and a google search let me to another forum which suggested adding the command \pdfminorversion=6 to the preamble, which removed the warning. That command does not seem to be working here. Any ideas?

[frabjous]

What do you mean when you say that this command is not working? It throws an error message? Or it doesn't, but you continue to get the warning? Does the output look OK?

My preferred way of doing this is to make sure that the PDFs you are including themselves use a lower version number. You'll first want to check whether the program you used to create the PDFs itself has an option for lowering their version number to 1.4.

If not, you can use Ghostscript to change their version numbers. Ghostscript comes with a program called ps2pdf14 that takes either postscript files, or PDF files, as input, and outputs a PDF 1.4 file.

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ps2pdf14 mypdf.pdf mypdf-14.pdf

from the commandline should work. (I might be able to give better instructions if you tell us what operating system you're using.)

[pmitchell12]

When I use the command \pdfminorversion I get a fatal error, no output. I'm running texniccenter on Windows 7. The images look fine in the output, no errors but several warnings all of the same type. Does this help?

[frabjous]

No clue why you're getting that fatal error. A minimal working example would be necessary to diagnose it.

If the output looks fine, this probably isn't a big deal, but if you wanted to follow my other advice, I think you'd have to do something like this... this is some guesswork, since I don't have Windows installed, and Windows generally drives me nuts, but I think it should work to do this:

1. Open the "Command Prompt" (or DOS prompt)".
2. Type in:

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   cd "C:\Path to\Where your\PDF files\are"
   

   Obviously, use the real folder names.
3. Now for each one type in:

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   ps2pdf14.bat "filename1.pdf" "filename1-14.pdf"
   

   If that doesn't work, you might need to put in the full path to ps2pdf14.bat, which I'd guess was something like:

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   "C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.00\bin\ps2pdf14.bat" "filename1.pdf" "filename1-14.pdf"  
   

   That's a guess, and is probably wrong. Try to find ps2pdf14.bat in Windows Explorer if need be. If you can't find it, I think ps2pdf.bat would also work. You'll need to check where Ghostscript is installed (and of course install it if you don't have it installed already!)
   If there are really quite a lot, it should be possible to loop over them, but I'd have to remind myself a bit about how that worked under DOS. (Ugh.)
4. open filename1-14.pdf and check to make sure it looks OK, and then either edit your source to insert filename1-14.pdf, or else replace filename1.pdf with the modified filename1-14.pdf.

Not sure if that's worth it if the output looks OK and you don't mind putting up with the warnings. I think the only point of the warnings is that it is possible for PDF 1.6 to have advanced features that PDFLaTeX cannot handle, but there's a good chance you would already know about that if there were.