Bug 15329

Summary:	Incorrect rendering of fonts
Product:	poppler	Reporter:	Greg Grossmeier <greg.grossmeier>
Component:	general	Assignee:	poppler-bugs <poppler-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	minor
Priority:	low	CC:	clausen
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	first page, as rendered by acrobat

Description Greg Grossmeier 2008-04-02 12:53:43 UTC

Orignally opened on Launchpad:
http://launchpad.net/bugs/176735
================================
This file does not render correctly:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jrobins/researchpapers/unpublishedpapers/jr_clientel.pdf

There are many rendering problems. For example, the "ff" glyphs is rendered as a circle throughout.

I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 with all updates. I'm using the 0.6-0ubuntu2.1 version of the libpoppler2 package.

The fonts are all poorly spaced in the linked document.
The last character on the first line should be an asterisk rather than a box.
The characters after "Robinson" and "Verdier" in the second line should be "1" and "2" rather "x" and "y".
In the first footnote, Jeff Freiden's name is rendered as "Je* Feiden", where * is some weird circle shape.
===================

file uploaded to Launchpad to ensure access:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/13073977/jr_clientel.pdf

I can confirm the problems in libpoppler2: 0.6.4-1 with one exception:  The character in the first line that is a box for the reporter is now a character similar to an asterisk but not an asterisk.

Sorry if this specific issues has been reported before.

Comment 1 Albert Astals Cid 2008-04-02 13:13:57 UTC

Acroread 8.1.2 renders exactly the same we do, so i'll assume it's a creator problem more than a viewer problem.

Comment 2 Andrew Clausen 2008-04-02 13:41:23 UTC

It renders properly with Acrobat Reader 8.1.0 on Windows.  I wonder why it works inconsistently with different Acrobat versions?

Comment 3 Albert Astals Cid 2008-04-02 13:48:06 UTC

I tried Acrobat 8.1.2 on Windows and did not work either, please update to 8.1.2 and reopen and if still works for you.

Comment 4 Andrew Clausen 2008-04-04 14:43:46 UTC

Created attachment 15686 [details]
first page, as rendered by acrobat

Comment 5 Andrew Clausen 2008-04-04 14:46:53 UTC

I attached a PNG file illustrating how Acrobat 8.1.0 on Windows renders the document.

I'm a bit puzzled by Albert's definition of a bug -- even if (some versions of) Acrobat screw it up, it doesn't follow that poppler should too!  It might mean the bug should get lower priority, but you should at least keep the bug on file as unresolved.

Comment 6 Albert Astals Cid 2008-04-04 15:12:39 UTC

Well, you assume Acrobat 8.1.2 and poppler are screwing up while Acrobat 8.1.0 is doing it right. I think it's the other way around. Anyway i won't close the bug, you are going to keep reopening it anyway.

Ping the bug when the latest Acrobat and poppler don't render the same

Comment 7 Juliusz Chroboczek 2008-05-02 09:44:55 UTC

The attached PDF uses non-Unicode fonts that are not embedded in the PDF.
The PDF viewer must therefore substitute with fonts available to it; hence, the
rendering will depend on which particular fonts are installed on your system.

Adobe recommends that all fonts should be embedded in a PDF document; in recent
versions, they even recommend that the Base-13 fonts should be embedded.

If you reproduce this bug with a PDF file with all fonts embedded, please
reopen this bug.

-- Juliusz

Comment 8 Andrew Clausen 2008-05-03 13:35:10 UTC

Thanks Juliusz for tracking down the problem.

I think Evince / libpoppler should generate some kind of error or warning message.  (Although, it should be unobtrusive... perhaps it should only under "Document properties" in Evince, for example?)  Does libpoppler already provide this kind of facility?

Also, it would be useful to figure out what programs generate the broken PDFs, and see if there is a workaround (such as picking an appropriate font based on the program that generated the PDF.)

Comment 9 Albert Astals Cid 2008-05-03 15:12:33 UTC

Poppler already provides a way of asking if a font is embeded or not and in case it's not embeded, it provides a way to ask which font that is present in the system was used. If evince does not makes this available to the user open a bug in evince's bugtracker.

Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.