General ⇒ pdfpages | Strange Page Compatibility Failure

[Sarge]

I'm a fairly experienced R/Sweave/Beamer/LaTeX user, but a noob here.

I've used R and Sweave to create several Beamer presentations on Mac OSX 10.7.4. I'm using pdfpages to prepare 6-up handouts and have encountered behavior that leaves me utterly mystified. My code seems to work fine, but certain combinations of pages seem to be incompatible. Hints will be greatly appreciated.

For example, I have a presentation that fails on page 15 when I try to process the full file, but compilations works fine for some combinations of page including 15. Failure seems to depend on content, but not in an obvious way. For example, removing a figure from page 15 fixes the problem, but replacing page 15 with page 6 (which contains a similar plot and compiled fine) does not. More specifically:

My preamble could not be simpler:

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\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
...
\end{document}

This does NOT work (all pages at once; fails on page 15):

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\includepdf[pages=-,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

This does work (first 14 pages are okay):

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\includepdf[pages=1-14,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

This does NOT work (first 15 pages) and seems to confirm that page 15 is the problem:

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\includepdf[pages=1-15,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

However, page 15 is fine by itself...

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\includepdf[pages=15,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

...and even in context with some other pages:

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\includepdf[pages=14-16,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

So you would think I could simply bring in page 15 by itself, but no luck. This does not work:

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\includepdf[pages=1-14,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=15,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

Page 15 includes a figure that I prepared with R and Sweave. Removing the figure fixes the problem, but I think is a red herring. The same figure compiles fine on other pages, and replacing page 15 with a duplicate of page 6 (which includes an almost identical figure) does not fix the problem. Moreover, I can compile pages 6 and 15 together without problems (this works):

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\includepdf[pages=6,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}
\includepdf[pages=15,nup=2x3,frame,scale=0.7]{programming.pdf}

When compilation fails, my console returns something like this:

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<use programming.pdf, page 11> <use programming.pdf, page 12> [3 <./programming
.pdf> <./programming.pdf> <./programming.pdf> <./programming.pdf> <./programmin
g.pdf> <./programming.pdf>]
<programming.pdf, id=100, page=13, 364.19562pt x 273.14648pt>
<use programming.pdf, page 13> <use programming.pdf, page 13>
<programming.pdf, id=101, page=14, 364.19562pt x 273.14648pt>
<use programming.pdf, page 14> <use programming.pdf, page 14>
<programming.pdf, id=102, page=15, 364.19562pt x 273.14648pt>
<use programming.pdf, page 15> <use programming.pdf, page 15>
<use programming.pdf, page 1> <use programming.pdf, page 1>
<use programming.pdf, page 1> <use programming.pdf, page 1>
<use programming.pdf, page 1> <use programming.pdf, page 1>
<use programming.pdf, page 13> <use programming.pdf, page 14>
<use programming.pdf, page 15> [4 <./programming.pdf> <./programming.pdf> <./pr
ogramming.pdf

[Sarge]

Although I would much rather find a solution that allows straight-up use of pdfpages with my Beamer output, I did find a kludgy solution: reading my PDF files created with LaTeX into Adobe Acrobat; using "save as" to create new PDFs from them; and running pdfpages on the resaved files.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Sarge,

welcome to the board!

Yes, it seems strange. It's hard to verify without a problematic pdf file. But nice to know, that you found a workaround, thanks for posting it.

Stefan