Ghostscript no longer supports UTF-16-BE-hex strings as a way of supplying Unicode data in pdfmark so we have lost this functionality too: http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commit;h=e997c6836d243ab37fe3a5f0d57974af95eb5eac For users this means setting --title, --author, etc. will not work if gs 9.24 is installed, but if the file has existing metadata it might work. For now we enforce police-state-strict ASCII, until there's time to implement proper metadata editing. Relevant tests set to xfail.