[DVIPDFMx] ebb conflicts with same named file from dvipdfm

[Jin-Hwan Cho]

On May 26, 2008, at 10:00 PM, Jonathan Underwood wrote:

> I package both dvipdfm  and dvipdfmx for Fedora, and with the
> introduction of the file ebb in the 20080520 snapshot of dvipdfmx
> there is now a conflict since we ship a file for dvipdfm with the same
> name. It is very useful to have both dvipdfm and dvipdfmx installed at
> the same time for regression testing. So, my solution was to rename
> the file from dvipdfmx to ebbx. The attached (trivial) patch
> accomplishes this. It might be useful if you adoptedd this approach,
> as TeXLive will face a similar problem.

Thanks for your report. Actually there were two bounding box extraction
utilities, ebb and xbb.

As you might know, ebb is quite old and it is not useful in these days
because it does not support pdf files with version 1.4 or higher.
Moreover, the bounding box calculated by ebb from JPEG or PNG makes
different size figures as compared to the result by pdfTeX.
So we made a new bounding box extraction program xbb.

Recently, Karl Berry, the maintainer of TeXLive suggested to combine
those programs into dvipdfmx. He wanted just one executable, and the
name of the new extraction utility became "extractbb". It behaves as xbb
and with "-m" option, it behaves as ebb (but more powerful).

Anyway, as I guess, Karl wanted to remove the original (buggy) ebb
from TeXLive. So there may be no problem with TeXLive. Moreover, I do
not want the name "ebbx". If you want to remain the original "ebb". Just
do not make the link, because if someone wants a new ebb, he can use
"extractbb -m" instead.

Best regards, ChoF.