pdfoutput = 1

A short post to share a latex trick.

I ran into the following issue twice when submitting a paper to arXiv: I get an error saying that the pdf could not be produced, although everything works well on overleaf and on my computer. The arxiv compilation logs seem to say that everything is fine. The arXiv advice for this type of error is not really helping, just hinting that there could be a problem with figures. And indeed there are some tikz figures in these papers, but nothing fancy. Also the document classes are some standard ACM or LIPICs; nothing problematic there a priori.

The truth is, I still don’t know what is the problem. My student Sébastien and I just dug up some forum with a magic spell. Just add the following just after documentclass:

\pdfoutput=1

And it worked perfectly. If you run into similar trouble, maybe this will help.