Created attachment 140066 [details]
PDF rendered by pdftocairo

I see this behavior (only) for PDFs which make use of the (not-embedded) base 14 PDF fonts. Poppler uses Times-Roman to render both Times-Bold and Times-Italic.

$ pdffonts poppler_font_styles.pdf
name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
Times-Roman                          Type 1            Standard         no  no  no       4  0
Times-Italic                         Type 1            Standard         no  no  no       7  0
Times-Bold                           Type 1            Standard         no  no  no      10  0

The output of pdftocairo is attached:

$ pdftocairo -f 1 -singlefile -png poppler_font_styles.pdf poppler_font_styles

evince renders the PDF in the same way.


I would think this worked correctly in the past, but I can't be sure.

The file renders fine for me. What does `pdffonts -subst poppler_font_styles.pdf` show?

It depends on which fonts you have installed and how fontconfig is set up. This is most likely an issue with your fontconfig configuration, not poppler

Aha. I though that was a possibility, so I did some checks with fc-match. Those seemed to be alright. But the output of pdffonts -subst does provide a good hint:

$ pdffonts -subst poppler_font_styles.pdf
name                                 object ID substitute font                      substitute font file
------------------------------------ --------- ------------------------------------ ------------------------------------
Times-Roman                               4  0 Times Roman                          /System/Library/Fonts/Times.ttc
Times-Italic                              7  0 Times Negrita Cursiva                /System/Library/Fonts/Times.ttc
Times-Bold                               10  0 Times Negrita                        /System/Library/Fonts/Times.ttc


I don't have a "Times Negrita" font installed, as far as I can see. Nor do I remember ever encountering that font. I have no clue how to continue, however.

I am experiencing the same issue with a PDF that uses Helvetica Bold Oblique. But the output of pdffonts on that file looks normal though.

$ pdffonts -subst sphinx_minimal.pdf
name                                 object ID substitute font                      substitute font file
------------------------------------ --------- ------------------------------------ ------------------------------------
Helvetica-Bold                            4  0 Helvetica Bold                       /System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.ttc
Helvetica-BoldOblique                     7  0 Helvetica Bold Oblique               /System/Library/Fonts/Helvetica.ttc
Times-Roman                              14  0 Times Roman                          /System/Library/Fonts/Times.ttc
Times-Italic                             21  0 Times Negrita Cursiva                /System/Library/Fonts/Times.ttc

Created attachment 140067 [details]
PDF showing issue with base 14 Helvetica Bold Oblique font

I've not heard of .ttc files before. I'm not sure how poppler handles it if there are multiple font variants in a single file.

I think this may be related: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/395645/italic-went-rogue-in-my-document-what-happened . The macOS High Sierra update made changes to the fonts.

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