Bug 3391 - Formatting problem with simple PDF
Summary: Formatting problem with simple PDF
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: poppler
Classification: Unclassified
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: x86 (IA32) Linux (All)
: high normal
Assignee: Kristian Høgsberg
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-05-24 20:17 UTC by Daniel Kasak
Modified: 2006-03-09 19:23 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
i915 platform:
i915 features:


Attachments
Simple PDF files that demonstrates issue (31.03 KB, application/pdf)
2005-05-24 20:18 UTC, Daniel Kasak
Details
footer on last page in evince (11.46 KB, image/png)
2005-09-09 13:35 UTC, Patrick Pletscher
Details
generated postscript (96.41 KB, application/postscript)
2005-09-09 22:53 UTC, Patrick Pletscher
Details

Description Daniel Kasak 2005-05-24 20:17:37 UTC
I'm attaching a PDF that demonstrates the problem.

Open the PDF in gpdf or Acrobat. Examine the group footers. For example, the 1st
one says "Total sales in January 2005: 21". Note how gpdf correctly renders the
1st column of the footer ( Total sales in January 2005: ) right-aligned, hard
against the 2nd column ( 21 ).

When I print the PDF via CUPS ( which I'm told uses poppler to to the PDF ==> PS
conversion ), the 1st column of the footer extends into the 2nd column. The
problem is even more pronounced on the last page, where the 1st column of the
grand total footer extends *way* into the 2nd column.

I can produce more example PDFs if required.
Comment 1 Daniel Kasak 2005-05-24 20:18:50 UTC
Created attachment 2773 [details]
Simple PDF files that demonstrates issue
Comment 2 Patrick Pletscher 2005-09-09 13:33:33 UTC
If I view your pdf file in evince (which uses poppler), the document is
displayed like in acroread. This includes the footer you mentioned.

Can you give some more information about your configuration (OS, distribution,
poppler version). I don't think this is a problem of poppler, as I haven't heard
of any distribution shiping a CUPS which uses poppler to do the PDF -> PS
conversion, but rather the ghostview tools, but I'm by far no expert...
Comment 3 Patrick Pletscher 2005-09-09 13:35:11 UTC
Created attachment 3213 [details]
footer on last page in evince

To double-check: Is this the expected result?
Comment 4 Daniel Kasak 2005-09-09 17:09:09 UTC
Thanks for the response.
Yes that attachment is what the output should look like.

Since reporting the bug here, I've also emailed the author of xpdf ( Derek
Noonburg ), and he replied saying that he'd fixed the issue for the next release
(  3.01 ). To be honest I can't remember why I ended up emailing him - someone
must have told me that he wrote the software that CUPS uses. So anyway now I'm
waiting for his changes to propogate into whatever CUPS uses. Unfortunately I
have very little idea how CUPS / xpdf / gpdf / other stuff works, so I'm hoping
that I've contacted the right people and everything will be OK.

You mentioned ghostview in your response. I will track down ghostview people and
see if they use xpdf code and whether they can update to the latest version.

I'll leave this bug status as-is at the moment, since I really don't understand
what is causing the bug. Feel free to close it if you think it's not a bug in
poppler.
Comment 5 Patrick Pletscher 2005-09-09 22:45:03 UTC
Ok, after some further playing around, I can now finally reproduce the bug.
although the pdf is displayed fine within evince, if you print the file to
Postscript, you get the behaviour described by Daniel: the first column of the
footer extends to the second.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open report.pdf in evince
2. Notice that displaying of pdf is correct
3. Go to print dialog
4. Select Generic Postscript
5. View resulting Postscript in ps-viewer (e.g. evince) and you can see that the
first column extends to the second.

I guess the same thing happens if you print this pdf from within evince.

Now of course the question, is this a problem of poppler or another program?

Daniel, forget the ghostview stuff I told you, I think this isn't correct.
Comment 6 Patrick Pletscher 2005-09-09 22:53:34 UTC
Created attachment 3217 [details]
generated postscript

Postscript generated by steps in last post.
Comment 7 Daniel Kasak 2005-10-23 19:12:16 UTC
According to multiple sources ( I've submitted bug reports all over the place ),
yes the bug is with poppler. Note that I'm just passing on what I've been told
here - I'm no expert on poppler / gpdf / evince myself.

See: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303621 for the 'resolution' of a
bug I submitted to the gnome buzilla page against gpdf, that mentions that the
bug is upstream - in poppler. Note that the *exact* same issue occurs with
evince as with gpdf.

I've contacted the author of xpdf, and he identified the bug and fixed it in the
current release of xpdf. He ( Derek Noonburg ) says:

That problem will be fixed in the upcoming 3.01 release.

As poppler is a fork of xpdf, I'm assuming the fix can be merged into xpdf
relatively easily. If I knew some C, I'd do it myself, but unfortunately Perl is
my current limit.

Also, this bug is set to 'needinfo'. As far as I know, this is incorrect. Maybe
someone can change this?
Comment 8 Daniel Kasak 2005-10-30 15:57:05 UTC
Re-assigning to Kristian as I think things have changed from 'needinfo'.
Comment 9 Daniel Kasak 2006-03-10 14:23:45 UTC
I'm very pleased to report that with the latest poppler / evince ( 0.5.1 of both
), this bug is FIXED!

Great work, whoever fixed it :)


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