Package: texlive-extra-utils
Version: 2024.20250309-2
Take a PDF file on your system, say,
/usr/share/doc/debian-reference-de/docs/debian-reference.de.pdf, and issue
pdfjam --landscape --nup 2x1 --output 2-on-1.pdf
/usr/share/doc/debian-reference-de/docs/debian-reference.de.pdf
Observe this printout:
----
pdfjam: This is pdfjam version 4.1.
pdfjam: Reading any site-wide or user-specific defaults...
(none found)
pdfjam: Effective call for this run of pdfjam:
/usr/bin/pdfjam --landscape --nup 2x1 --output 2-on-1.pdf --
/usr/share/doc/debian-reference-de/docs/debian-reference.de.pdf -
pdfjam: Calling /usr/bin/pdflatex...
pdfjam: FAILED.
The call to /usr/bin/pdflatex resulted in an error.
Rerun with '--no-tidy' or '--builddir PATH' to diagnose the problem.
pdfjam ERROR: Run 1: Output file not written
Alright, I thought, let's go with --no-tidy:
$ pdfjam --landscape --nup 2x1 --output 2-on-1.pdf --no-tidy
/usr/share/doc/debian-reference-de/docs/debian-reference.de.pdf
----
pdfjam: This is pdfjam version 4.1.
pdfjam: Reading any site-wide or user-specific defaults...
(none found)
pdfjam: Temporary directory for this job is
/tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO
pdfjam: Effective call for this run of pdfjam:
/usr/bin/pdfjam --landscape --nup 2x1 --output 2-on-1.pdf --no-tidy
-- /usr/share/doc/debian-reference-de/docs/debian-reference.de.pdf -
pdfjam: Calling /usr/bin/pdflatex...
pdfjam: FAILED.
The call to /usr/bin/pdflatex resulted in an error.
You can examine the build directory at
/tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO
to try to diagnose the problem.
pdfjam ERROR: Run 1: Output file not written
So let's peek into the directory:
$ ls /tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO
a.aux a.log a.msgs a.pdf a.tex call.txt debian-reference.de.pdf
messages.txt
$ tail /tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO/a.log
72i,17n,79p,253b,434s stack positions out of
10000i,1000n,20000p,200000b,200000s
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmmi9.pfb></usr
/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmsy9.pfb>
Output written on a.pdf (149 pages, 1304534 bytes).
PDF statistics:
915 PDF objects out of 1000 (max. 8388607)
366 compressed objects within 4 object streams
0 named destinations out of 1000 (max. 500000)
1496 words of extra memory for PDF output out of 10000 (max. 10000000)
This looks good so far, and /tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO/a.pdf indeed contains a 2-on-1
version. So the call to pdflatex didn't result in an error, did it?
Now I thought to myself: How to debug it next?
It took me a night and a day and more tests from here to understand that the
command line option “--output” was the culprit: it should read “--outfile”.
In retrospect,
$ egrep -i "error|warn|fail|miss|unknown|not found" /tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO/a.log
/tmp/pdfjam-uZGvhO/a.log:! Package keyval Error: output undefined.
would have helped, but yesterday it didn't occur to me to run this command.
My kind request would be that the pdfjam command-line options are parsed and
complained about immediately so that the user wouldn't need LaTeX knowledge
(here: search a.log for complaints and understand what “keyval” actually does)
if the only thing the user needs is to convert a PDF file 2 on 1.
