Evince does not display PDF text

[daviddou82]

Binary package hint: evince

I know there are texts in this document but the document view only shows blank lines and dots

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Apr 9 15:20:52 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince
Package: evince 2.22.2-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/opt/real/RealPlayer
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-23-generic i686

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, could you attach a pdf example to the bug?

[daviddou82 (daviddou82)]

I tried to attach the pdf file but it shows up as a text/html file

[daviddou82 (daviddou82)]

when i attach the file it shows up as "Problem document (898.3 KiB, text/html)"

[daviddou82 (daviddou82)]

"aa" is the document that i problem with

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

I can confirm on Jaunty that it does not render correctly in evince or xpdf, but does so in acroread.
Seems like a font issue, the errors on the console are:
Error: could not create type1 face
some font thing failed

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

(removed the wrong attachments, by the way)

Here's the output of pdfinfo:
Producer: FOP 0.20.5
Tagged: no
Pages: 5
Encrypted: no
Page size: 612 x 794 pts
File size: 919831 bytes
Optimized: no
PDF version: 1.3

And the output of pdffonts:
name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
KeplMM Type 1 yes no no 28 0
Avenir-Medium Type 1 yes no no 29 0
Helvetica Type 1 no no no 30 0
Avenir-Heavy Type 1 yes no no 31 0
Times-Bold Type 1 no no no 32 0
KeplMM Type 1 yes no no 34 0
Avenir-Medium Type 1 yes no no 35 0
Avenir-Black Type 1 yes no no 36 0
Helvetica Type 1 no no no 37 0
Avenir-Light Type 1 yes no no 38 0
Avenir-Heavy Type 1 yes no no 39 0
Avenir-Roman Type 1 yes no no 40 0
Times-Bold Type 1 no no no 41 0

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

This is a cairo font engine issue

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

why do you think that's a cairo issue rather than a poppler one? could you open the bug on bugs.freedesktop.org?

[Colan Schwartz (colan)]

This is still a problem in Lucid, 10.04. Here's another example. Output:

Error: could not create type1 face
some font thing failed

[bbruecker (bb-benjaminbruecker)]

Still an issue in Ubuntu 1204.

I would like if someone appreciate that this is a very tough bug. In my case in nearly 50 % of documents I need to read fonts are not displayed. Except this issue Evince is a very good tool, but I need to use other programs... Doesn't anybody know any work-a-round?

[Colan Schwartz (colan)]

An alternative product is ePDFViewer, also in the repositories.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Output of pdffonts for the file attached to comment #13.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Attached screenshot of correctly displayed document (Application: mupdf).

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Removed screenshot attachment as it belongs to similar ticket: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/1111429

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

 * Does the bug also appear with ePDFViewer (suggested by colan)?

 * Does mupdf correctly display the document?

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Testing the file Procurement_Mod.pdf with various pdf viewers listed on http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/PDF

 * evince: Affected
 * okular: Affected
 * epdfview: Affected
 * firefox: Affected
 * mupdf: works
 * xpdf: Crashes with Segmentation fault
 * qpdfview: (not available in Ubuntu 12.04)
 * zathura: Affected