acroread 9.5.5 (linux) shows binary garbadge after page numbers

[Heiko Oberdiek]

Hello,

On 2021-08-20 11:45, Harald Koenig via tex-live wrote:
> 
> I just notice that with TL-2021 pdflatex, I see binary garbage after page numners (see upper left in attached screenshot).
> 
> looking into the PDFs generated by TL-20 and TL-21 I see:
> 
> ---8<---    TL-20  ---8<------8<------8<------8<------8<---
>          /P (1)
>          /P (2)
> ---8<---    TL-21  ---8<------8<------8<------8<------8<---
>          /P <feff0031>
>          /P <feff0032>
> ---8<------8<------8<------8<------8<------8<---
> 
> 
> so the new byte order mark are part of that problem (and of course crappy old and broken acroread for linux:-(

The byte order mark is required for Unicode encoded strings (16-bit) in 
the PDF format and is used to distinguish it from the PDFDocEncoding 
(8-bit).

If this is not displayed by your PDF viewer correctly, then the PDF 
viewer is to blame.

However, hyperref also provides option 'pdfencoding=auto' since many 
year. In this modus, hyperref first encodes the strings to Unicode.
Then, the strings are tried to recode to PDFDocEncoding and uses them,
if this succeeds. Otherwise (with characters outside PDFDocEncoding),
the Unicode string is used.

That should fix your problem for simple page numbers or bookmarks, ...
The strings with Unicode characters will still look odd in your outdated
PDF viewer, but should look fine in other viewers.

Yours sincerely
   Heiko