Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

he current version of imagemagick (and its library used by gkrellshoot)
creates jpeg images that cannot be used in pdflatex with graphicx
anymore.

There is already a bugreport in redhats bugzilla[0].

[0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1086715

To have the informations also in this bug, this is the result I have
seen (Only relevant part):
- --- input.tex
...
\usepackage{graphicx}
...
\includegraphics{gkrellShoot_xxxx}
...
- ---

- --- Output
...
pdfTeX warning: pdflatex: arithmetic: number too big


pdfTeX warning: pdflatex: arithmetic: number too big
<gkrellShoot_xxxx.jpg, id=165, --32768.0pt x 0.0pt>
<use gkrellShoot_xxxx.jpg>
Overfull \hbox (67.0553pt too wide) has occurred while \output is active
[][] \T1/cmss/m/sc/6 ([])

Analysis:
The reason is very simple: recent versions of imagemagick write
resolution information to the JPEG files (such as 1 dpi), so
you end up with very very large image (several meters large !), and
latex just gives up.

While I agree this is clearly a problem with imagemagick, it is also
a bug in LaTeX.

A simple workaround is the following: add a -density 75 option
before the output in convert:

convert bad_jpeg.jpeg -density 75 latex_friendly_jpeg.jpeg

I do not know if it is a bug or a feature....

Not a bug. If you don't specify a resolution with the -density option the JPEG library sets defaults as follows:

• UINT8 density_unit
  UINT16 X_density
  UINT16 Y_density
  The resolution information to be written into the JFIF marker;
  not used otherwise. density_unit may be 0 for unknown,
  1 for dots/inch, or 2 for dots/cm. The default values are 0,1,1
  indicating square pixels of unknown size.

suggests the bug is in pdflatex for not properly handling the JPEG default density. We could set a default resolution to 72,72 for JPEG but that would mean that pdflatex would work for ImageMagick but fail for other applications that use the JPEG defaults when writing a JPEG image. What is your recommendation?

My sugestion is ignore and document this behavior and workarroud with old pdflatex version (will try to fix newer)