Cannot read property 'compressed' of undefined

We ran into a pdfjs (v2.4.5) problem: https://github.com/nbesli/pdf-merger-js/issues/42

The following code-snipped…

const doc = new pdf.Document()
const src = await fs.readFile(path.join(FIXTURES_DIR, 'issue-42.pdf'))
const ext = new pdf.ExternalDocument(src)
doc.addPagesOf(ext)
const fileBuffer = await doc.asBuffer()
await fs.writeFile(path.join(TMP_DIR, 'Testfile_issue-42.pdf'), fileBuffer)

…results in this error:

TypeError: Cannot read property 'compressed' of undefined

      at parseObject (node_modules/pdfjs/lib/object/reference.js:81:15)
      at PDFReference.get [as object] (node_modules/pdfjs/lib/object/reference.js:15:17)
      at Function.addObjectsRecursive (node_modules/pdfjs/lib/parser/parser.js:68:35)
      at Function.addObjectsRecursive (node_modules/pdfjs/lib/parser/parser.js:84:18)
      at Function.addObjectsRecursive (node_modules/pdfjs/lib/parser/parser.js:75:16)
      at ExternalDocument.write (node_modules/pdfjs/lib/external.js:62:14)

Please find the problematic PDF file attached: issue-42.pdf

[rkusa]

Thanks for the report! I looked into it and the cause of the issue seems to be that pdfjs does not support hybrid-reference files. More specifically, the support for the XRefStm property of the trailer is not yet implemented. While it successfully falls back to the normale xref table (instead of the xref stream), the normal xref table is missing the object with the ID 46, which is thus unknown and causes the error you’ve posted.

Possible solutions:

• Implement support for XRefStm
• Silently ignore missing objects (I am not sure if I’d like this solution though)

I don’t have the time right now to implement it, but I’ll keep it in the back of my mind.

[necropolina]

Any suggested temporary fixes that we might be able to use to circumvent this error while the issue is waiting to be resolved?