Dimension too large. error from pdflatex when using \includegraphics

Question

I am getting the following error on few images being loaded by pdflatex. The images are in pdf files. MWE

\documentclass[10pt,notitlepage]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,height=\textheight,keepaspectratio]{image}
\end{document}

pdflatex foo.tex gives

(/usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/etexcmds.sty)))
(/usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/latex/latexconfig/epstopdf-sys.cfg))
! Dimension too large.
<argument> \ht \@tempboxa 

l.7 ...,height=\textheight,keepaspectratio]{image}

? 

The image.pdf is this link

It doe not matter if the image size specification is there or not, the error still shows up. i.e. \includegraphics[]{image} also generates the error.

The image pdf file has nothing in it. This is another issue. This image pdf file was created by Mathematica Export command. I was exporting a Mathematica image to pdf and it looks like Mathematica could not export the image to pdf file so it wrote an empty image pdf file. But the question is why pdflatex gives an error?

Is there a memory limit or some build in limit on size of pdf image files or dimensions?

I am using TL 2015 on linux mint 7.2

ps. Here is an example of pdf image file that is correctly read by pdflatex. It is not as large (and happened not to be empty as well).

Update:

fyi, Thanks to cfr comment in my other question How to check that image has valid size before `\includegraphics` is called? , using pdfinfo -box image.pdf gives

>pdfinfo -box image.pdf
Creator:        Wolfram Mathematica 10.1.0.0 for Microsoft Windows (64-bit) (March 23, 2015) Student Edition - Personal Use Only
Producer:       
CreationDate:   Tue Jul 21 13:15:48 2015
ModDate:        Tue Jul 21 13:15:48 2015
Tagged:         no
Form:           none
Pages:          1
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      504 x 18988 pts
Page rot:       0
MediaBox:           0.00     0.00   504.00 18988.00
CropBox:            0.00     0.00   504.00 18988.00
BleedBox:           0.00     0.00   504.00 18988.00
TrimBox:            0.00     0.00   504.00 18988.00
ArtBox:             0.00     0.00   504.00 18988.00
File size:      337034 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.5
>

Answer 1

There's a limit for graphics dimensions, bounded above by \maxdimen (16384pt); in the case of the height for images, the limit is around 574cm to 576cm for some of the images I tested. For example,

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

\includegraphics[height=576cm,width=2cm]{example-image-a}  

\end{document}

triggers the error message, but using 575 there's no error (just the obvious warning about overfull \vbox)

Your image is almost 670cm high! (clearly higher than \maxdimen) so the error is triggered. Besides that, what would you do with such a large image compressed to fit into an a4paper document?

Answer 2

This may happen also if the image has sane size, but has declared incorrect DPI set (for example 800x600 pixels image, but with 2x2 DPI set... which makes it 1000 cm wide).

You can correct the DPI in an image editor (well, if it is not a PDF file), and it should work fine.

Answer 3

Another issue that seems to cause this problem is if the image is in CMYK colorspace (even if the dimensions are below the max limit). To fix this, you can re-save it as an RGB image using Photoshop or another image editing tool, or convert it directly using one of the many converters online such as http://www.cmykconverter.com/

This occurred with XeLateX on the Overleaf platform.