6.4.4. Acrobat Reader 5 does not show thumbnails in Linux

The thumbpdf script creates thumbnails for the PDF document just fine (see Section 7.2.11). Things work fine even with a thumbpdf.tex of version 3.2 and a thumbpdf of version 2.8, i.e. even if the versions of these two files differ (in which case thumbpdf will issue a warning, see Section 6.2).

Yet, one day, I recomputed the PDF version of a document, only to discover that the thumbnails were appearing intermittently in the document: some (few) appeared, the rest showed just a blank thumbnail. After an extensive Internet search (with very few results on the subject...) and a check with both Acrobat Reader 5 for Linux and Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, it became clear that this is a problem of Acrobat Reader 5 for Linux and large thumbnails (small thumbnails are displayed fine).

I guess there is nothing you can do about this problem, other than switch to small thumbnails (right-click on the thumbnail area to see the context menu that will allow you to choose this), or upgrade to a version of Acrobat Reader that does not suffer from this bug.