Why does pdflatex crash with the pdfpages packages, and is there anything I can do to prevent this?

Question

I wish to append some pdf documents to the end of a larger document I'm writing, but find that using the \includepdf command provided by pdfpages always crashes pdflatex.

The following example exibits the behaviour:

First create a test pdf, which we will append to the main doc:

\documentclass{minimal}

\begin{document}

This is some text

\end{document}

Then

\documentclass{minimal}

\usepackage{pdfpages}


\begin{document}

  This is the text in the main doc.

  \includepdf[pages={~}]{test_pdf.pdf}

\end{document}

This causes pdflates to crash with a 'pdflatex has encountered a problem' message. In this case I'm using MikTeX 2.9 on windows XP Pro 32 Bit with Texniccenter 1.0 as my editor (although Texworks also fails, not that I think the editor has anything to do with it, but you never know). I haven't tried on other platforms. In case it's relevent I do not normally have admin access on this PC.

Is this a known problem, and is there a latex work around? I'm aware of other non-latex methods to append the pdfs if necessary.

Answer 1

The error message is

!pdfTeX error: pdflatex (file \protect \unhbox \voidb@x \penalty \@M \ {}.pdf):
 cannot find image file

which is caused by calling the option

pages={~}

rather than the correct

pages=-

I don't think there's a really safe protection against such errors.