Bug 71274

@reporter: I can not identify from the screenshots what exactly you are rating as "looking creepy".

Also, on my currently used Mac system the uploaded PDF seems to render just fine with gv, Ghostscript, Preview.app, Adobe Acrobat Professional, callas pdfToolbox, evince, mupdf-x11 and oKular.

But I can see from your uploaded PDF, that it does not have all fonts embedded. 'Arial' and 'Arial,Bold' are missing. Also 'pdffonts' notes that fontconfig complains about a problem with one of the embedded fonts:

 pdffonts poppler-bug-#88723.pdf 
   Fontconfig warning: ignoring UTF-8: not a valid region tag
  name              type              encoding     emb sub uni object ID
  ----------------- ----------------- ------------ --- --- --- ---------
  Arial             TrueType          WinAnsi      no  no  no       5  0
  ABCDEE+Verdana    TrueType          WinAnsi      yes yes no       7  0
  Arial             CID TrueType      Identity-H   yes no  yes     13  0
  Symbol            CID TrueType      Identity-H   yes no  yes     18  0
  Arial,Bold        TrueType          WinAnsi      no  no  no      29  0
  Arial,Bold        CID TrueType      Identity-H   yes no  yes     54  0

On my local system, I do have appropriate replacement fonts available:

 pdffonts -subst poppler-bug-#88723.pdf 
   Fontconfig warning: ignoring UTF-8: not a valid region tag
   name         object ID substitute font substitute font file
   ------------ --------- --------------- -----------------------------
   Arial             5  0 Arial           /Library/Fonts/Arial.ttf
   Arial,Bold       29  0 Arial Negreta   /Library/Fonts/Arial Bold.ttf

You should run this last command on your system to see which substitute font Poppler/fontconfig do use for the too missing ones. Maybe these are responsible for your "creepy look".

Two points:

  1. To solve this problem for real, you need to recreate the PDF in question
     and ensure all used fonts are properly embedded.

  2. Since this real solution is not always possible (you haven't created the
     PDF yourself, but downloaded it from the internet, f.e.), you can try it
     with a workaround:
      - install the proper replacement fonts
      - set up fontconfig so that it makes use of these replacement fonts.

OK, I probably reported the bug too early. If you say it is because of 
my font setup, then I will have to check that. What I actually meant was 
bad kerning, I thought I had said that, sorry. Thank you!