Bug 11864

Summary:	strange font behaviour - connected letters
Product:	poppler	Reporter:	Sebastien Bacher <seb128>
Component:	general	Assignee:	poppler-bugs <poppler-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	philsf79
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Sebastien Bacher 2007-08-06 06:42:09 UTC

The bug has been opened on https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/128074

"Binary package hint: evince

Hello,

in a particular PDF I have, the letters seem strangely connected, and some appear as symbols. The same file appears nicely in xpdf and adobe reader.

I'm including a screenshot.

How can I provide better information to get it fixed?

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/8561960/evince-feisty.png
evince-feisty.png (124.4 KiB, image/png)

I forgot to mention I'm using Feisty.

Here's the screenshot.

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/8561964/Pybus_et_al_2000_Genetics.pdf
Pybus_et_al_2000_Genetics.pdf (156.0 KiB, application/pdf)

And here's the original file.

evince prints it ok, FWIW (except for bug #120861, but that can be worked around)."

Comment 1 Jeff Muizelaar 2007-08-06 06:55:02 UTC

looks like a font substitution problem and could probably be fixed with fontconfig reconfiguration

Comment 2 Sebastien Bacher 2007-08-06 07:08:09 UTC

what sort of reconfiguration are you speaking about?

Comment 3 Carlos Garcia Campos 2007-08-06 07:16:08 UTC

It's not cairo backend specific. Looks like fontconfig problem.

Comment 4 Jeff Muizelaar 2007-08-08 15:05:35 UTC

This isn't really a font substitution problem. Currently we don't adjust the widths of characters when we substitute fonts. xpdf has a hack that compares the widths of the 'm' characters and adjusts the size to match. That hack was removed from poppler when the fontconfig patch went in.

I'm not sure the best way to fix this yet.

Comment 5 Felipe Figueiredo 2008-06-20 13:16:58 UTC

What about re-inserting the hack patch? Is it incompatible with the fontconfig patch?

Comment 6 Albert Astals Cid 2008-06-20 15:03:06 UTC

The m-hack has been reintroduced a while ago.

Comment 7 Felipe Figueiredo 2008-06-20 16:24:48 UTC

@Albert
I still get this issue in a lot of documents in evince 2.22.2-0ubuntu1 with libpoppler 0.6.4-1ubuntu1 in Ubuntu 8.04. Has the m-hack been introduced before this bug was posted?

Comment 8 Albert Astals Cid 2008-06-20 16:48:04 UTC

poppler 0.6.4 is old, bug your distribution to update it.

Comment 9 Felipe Figueiredo 2008-07-23 06:00:48 UTC

From the ubuntu bug report:

"I decided to try fool evince into using poppler3 from intrepid. Intrepid version compiles fine on Hardy, and I managed to replace them with an ugly hack with symlinks between libpoppler.so.3/libpoppler.so.2 and libpoppler-glib.so.3/libpoppler-glib.so.2. Not surprisingly, it was very unstable, and evince crashed on mouseover actions, so I couldn't select/copy to test for other bugs (bug #33288 for example). But it kind of worked.

I'm attaching a new screenshot of the result. It's still not perfect, the "fi" string still appear as an undefined (to me at least) ascii character (look for the first sentence in the abstract: "We describe a unified ...". Also appear in the last two of the abstract). Even so, readbility has improved vastly in this case. Unfortunately, I can't use this hack for production use, since they cause evince to crash more often than not."

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15681507/Screenshot-097561u480.png

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