[upstream] openoffice.org PDF conversion puts lines into background

[Joe Harrington]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

I may have slightly misspecified the package, since there are many openoffice.org packages.

If I have a presentation or drawing with a gradient in the background, and I save as PDF, a series of white, one-pixel-wide lines appears that were not visible in the presentation. Each pair of lines encloses a single color in the gradient. So far this is mainly a problem only for large documents, such as posters, but it essentially makes it impossible to print posters with gradients. Here is an example from a presentation.

http://conference.scipy.org/static/wiki/joe_harrington_docmarathon.pdf

The problem is 100% reproducible for documents in which it occurs.

64-bit intel, patched
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release: 8.04

openoffice.org:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2
  Version table:
     1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/main Packages
     1:2.4.0-3ubuntu6 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages

--jh--

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

Does this only happen on diagonal gradients? I can't reproduce it on a vertical gradient.

[Neil Munro (neilmunro-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks for your bug report, using your files I can confirm that this happens, setting status to confirmed.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Do you still have this problem with openoffice.org 1:2.4.1-11ubuntu2 in Ubuntu 8.10?

If so can you attach the original source document that converts incorrectly?

Thanks,

Chris Cheney

[Joe Harrington (joeharr)]

I am in a production 8.04 environment and cannot do tests on later versions, but you can take the .ppt I posted and try it yourself.

Also, I had the same problem in the past week at a conference, where we tried converting a file with a gradient to PDF on both Windows OpenOffice and Mac NeoOffice. I do not know what versions they had of those programs but it was a professional conference AV service so I expect they were current.

Thanks,

--jh--

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Sorry somehow I overlooked that file I guess. Yes I can reproduce this on openoffice.org 1:2.4.1-11ubuntu2.

Thanks,

Chris

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Also seen in upstream openoffice.org 3.0.0.

[Adrian Busolini (aab-cs)]

Same problem experienced in 1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2.1 on 8.04. The problem most definitely exists with vertical gradients too.

Has anybody discovered any workaround *at all* for this problem, bar removing all gradients? I'm in desperate need of a clean document conversion, and can find no way at all to achieve this without altering the design of all my seminar slides.

Moreover, has anybody managed to locate the upstream bug report? I checked on OO's bug database but couldn't find a reference to the problem.

[Adrian Busolini (aab-cs)]

Ah, I just found the link to OO's bug report under the 'Assigned to' heading above.

[Adrian Busolini (aab-cs)]

I've noticed that the white lines DO NOT appear when the PDF is opened using the official Acrobat Reader (on Windows and Linux). They DO appear when it's opened with Evince (GNOME's PDF viewer) and 'Docs' for iPhone.

I'm inferring therefore that possibly OO doesn't use the 'correct'/standard method(s) for exporting gradients, and I'm guessing that both evince and this 'docs' application use the same libraries for reading PDF files, which can't properly cope with whatever OO is doing.

Have others experienced the same effects as above? I will try out some other PDF viewers (probably KDE-based) when I find some time.

[Adrian Busolini (aab-cs)]

It seems the problem really resides in Poppler - the free library used by Evince and many others to read PDFs. Specifically, it appears to be in the Cairo backend of Poppler, as people seem to be reporting other backends render the PDFs correctly.

Links to the main bug reports citing gradient issues (filed under Poppler, which is overseen by FreeDesktop.org):

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10942
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14160
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15501
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16235

KPDF and XPDF suffer from the same problems as Evince - presumably using the same poppler libraries with Cairo. Interestingly, gv entirely failed to load my test PDF documents.

So I don't know if a problem also exists within OO - I haven't done the final test of using some pieces of rubbish such as Microshi* Office/Adobe Acrobat to create some PDFs with gradients and test loading them with the poppler libraries.

[Pedro Saraiva (pedro-a34195)]

@Adrian Busolini

Hello,

I don't know what libs google docs use to convert/display pdf, but the white lines are present on the gradient. Not tried with acrobat reader, but with foxit reader (there's a linux version!) it shows the gradient fine. So I guess it's not a openoffice issue.

Best regards,

Pedro Saraiva

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

Isn't this a duplicate of bug #164233? It states the same thing and has the same upstream bug watch added, as far as I can see.

[Joe Harrington (joeharr)]

Yes, it appears to be the same complaint. It's also over 2 years old, and still doing it (ooo 3.2.0.10 in Ubuntu 10.4). Can this be so hard to fix? There's a whole generation of young scientists being pushed to PowerPoint for conference posters over this one issue.

--jh--

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

Marking as a duplicate of bug #164233 then.