Whatever I tried, I could not search in any pdf document (using poppler 0.3.1, no later version in debian, sorry). Turns out the reason are uninitialised values! Will attach a patch.
Created attachment 3268 [details] [review] Other part of the patch
Is this still happening? The patch seems to be against X?
The patch is clearly bogus, I must've attached the wrong one. I haven't used a powerpc machine (other than as a test target) in about a year, but I doubt such a bug would still be present almost five years later, heh ... But I still have one ... and evince on it at least _can_ search, and I must've been using that when filing this bug, so I guess the bug's gone.
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