Wrong PDF standard fonts are replaced when fonts package "fonts-texgyre" is installed - PDFs are rendered with missing characters
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
fontconfig (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Hi,
please see following bug report on freedesktop with screenshots:
https:/
When fonts package "fonts-texgyre" from the "texgyre" package is installed,
all PDFs containing e.g. a reference to a "Helvetica" font, which is usually not installed on Ubuntu systems, fontconfig mages a very bad choice with one of the fonts supplied in fonts-texgyre (like "TeX Gyre Heros").
The problem is, apparantly the texgyre fonts us a different naming style for some important glyphs (like greek characters contained in many mathematical documents), so that fontconfig cannot find them.
See screenshots in abovementioned bugreport:
==> PDF readers only display a blank space in this case, which has potentially disastrous results (there are six orders of magnitude difference between an Ampere current and a Microampere current e.g..).
There is a likely explanation also unter this bugreport:
https:/
==> Please change the Ubuntu font configuration so that all those PDFs are displayed correctly.
Who experiences this problem can use the following workaround as described in the source bugreport: fonts.conf the following section before the "</fontconfig>" tag:
Add to ~/.config/
<match target="pattern"> Helvetica< /string> NimbusSansL< /string>
<test name="family">
<string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="same">
<string>
</edit>
</match>
A real fix for the original problem however is likely a change of the Ubuntu trusty default fontconfig config (package: fontconfig-config) or an update to the font renderer. (Quoting https:/ /bugs.launchpad .net/ubuntu/ +source/ tex-gyre/ +bug/1317599/ comments/ 8:
"Ideally, renderers would notice that the glyph name they want is unavailable and look for alternate names.")