#27 pdfsandwich failes after 'convert' error

[Bruno Courbage]

Pdfsandwich is failing on my system (MacOS Mojave) on all PDF jobs (single or multi-page jobs). I originally thought this might be linked to Bug #22 or #25 but it doesn't appear to be the case. Here is the full output of the verbose command:

pdfsandwich -verbose mypdf.pdf 
pdfsandwich version 0.1.6
Checking for convert:
convert -version
Version: ImageMagick 6.9.9-40 Q16 x86_64 2019-06-25 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: © 1999-2018 ImageMagick Studio LLC
License: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php
Features: Cipher DPC Modules 
Delegates (built-in): bzlib djvu fftw fontconfig freetype gslib jbig jng jp2 jpeg lcms ltdl lzma openexr png ps raw tiff webp x xml zlib
Checking for unpaper:
unpaper -V
6.1
Checking for tesseract:
tesseract -v
tesseract 4.0.0
 leptonica-1.77.0
  libjpeg 9c : libpng 1.6.37 : libtiff 4.0.10 : zlib 1.2.11 : libwebp 1.0.2 : libopenjp2 2.3.1
 Found AVX
 Found SSE
Checking for gs:
gs -v
GPL Ghostscript 9.27 (2019-04-04)
Copyright (C) 2018 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Checking for pdfinfo:
pdfinfo -v
pdfinfo version 0.78.0
Copyright 2005-2019 The Poppler Developers - http://poppler.freedesktop.org
Copyright 1996-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC
Checking for pdfunite:
pdfunite -v
pdfunite version 0.78.0
Copyright 2005-2019 The Poppler Developers - http://poppler.freedesktop.org
Copyright 1996-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC
Input file: "mypdf.pdf"
Output file: "mypdf_ocr.pdf"
Number of pages in inputfile: 2
More threads than pages. Using 2 threads instead.

Parallel processing with 2 threads started.
Processing page order may differ from original page order.

Processing page 2.
identify -format "%w\n%h\n"  "/var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwich_inputfile68af10.pdf[1]" 
Processing page 1.
identify -format "%w\n%h\n"  "/var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwich_inputfile68af10.pdf[0]" 
Warning: could not determine page size; defaulting to A4.
convert -units PixelsPerInch  -type Bilevel -density 300x300  "/var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwich_inputfile68af10.pdf[1]" /var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwichca3e56.pbm
Warning: could not determine page size; defaulting to A4.
convert -units PixelsPerInch  -type Bilevel -density 300x300  "/var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwich_inputfile68af10.pdf[0]" /var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwich3c4c04.pbm
ERROR: Command "convert -units PixelsPerInch  -type Bilevel -density 300x300  "/var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwich_inputfile68af10.pdf[1]" /var/folders/zv/4grr_0152bng1c9jn0zdltsh0000gn/T/pdfsandwichca3e56.pbm" failed. 
Terminating pdfsandwich. All temporary files are kept.

[Tobias Elze]

Strangely enough, we don't see any specific error message from convert, only the message that it doesn't work. Do you see more if you execute the same command "manually", i.e.

convert -units PixelsPerInch -type Bilevel -density 300x300 "mypdf.pdf[1]" "output.pbm"

Does this work or do you see any error?

[Bruno Courbage]

Abort trap: 6

[Bruno Courbage]

After some research, I found that the issue is with the current version of ghostscript (9.27). It occurs on a Mac, with ImageMagick (and ghostscript) installed via Macports. The solution is to downgrade to the prior version of Ghostscript.

Here are a list of commands in case anyone can benefit from them:

git clone --single-branch https://github.com/macports/macports-ports.git
cd macports-ports
git checkout af11993aab38d7ba77c2df895aa5ce9b405c5681
cd print/ghostscript
sudo port install

When asked if you'd like to rebuild ImageMagick @6.9.9-40+x11, enter 'y'.

Source/credit for this material, and explanation of the commands is available at https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/InstallingOlderPort.

I want to thank Tobias for his help pointing me in the right direction.

[Pablo AB]

In my case was this classic issue.