> Ah, maybe warn is being trapped.  What if you change
> that "warn" to "print STDERR".

Didn't help.

> You might also add to your "run_program was here!" ...

Thanks.  I wanted to do something like that, but didn't
know how to do it.  Now I see:

   Error (0): PDF file is damaged - attempting to
     reconstruct xref table...
   run_program:
     params are [/u/gl/rdm/local/bin/pdfinfo
                 /tmp/gH9xk99jNu];
     doc is http://www.slac.stanford.edu/...pdf

   Error (0): PDF file is damaged - attempting to
     reconstruct xref table...
   run_program:
     params are [/u/gl/rdm/local/bin/pdftotext
                 /tmp/gH9xk99jNu -];
     doc is http://www.slac.stanford.edu/...pdf

> On the other hand maybe it's not returning an error code.  Try first 
> from the command line.  So if your problem pdf
> is called "bad.pdf" you can try with:
>
>   pdfinfo bad.pdf || echo "It's bad"
>
> I assume pdfinfo or pdftotext is returning an error code.

As the trace indicates, both programs are having problems
with the same file.  Unfortunately, no error code is being
returned:

   rdm@flora02 $ pdfinfo ...pdf || echo "It's bad"
   Error (0): PDF file is damaged - attempting to
     reconstruct xref table...
   Title:          Microsoft PowerPoint - EM2-pri_boot
   Author:         mark
   Creator:        PScript5.dll Version 5.2
   Producer:       Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Windows
   CreationDate:   Fri Feb 20 17:29:20 2004
   ModDate:        Fri Feb 20 17:29:33 2004
   Tagged:         no
   Pages:          22
   Encrypted:      no
   Page size:      612 x 792 pts (letter)
   File size:      321187 bytes
   Optimized:      yes
   PDF version:    1.3

So, it appears that we (still :-) need a way to figure
out that an error was detected.  OTOH, I now have the
name of the PDF file, so I tried it out in (OSX) Preview.
It displays very cleanly, so I suspect that pdfinfo may
just be confused...

-r