[Hardy] evince prints random chars instead of text with a specific PDF file

[Danilo Piazzalunga]

Binary package hint: evince

Printing this file[1] from evince (using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy) results in a document with only figures, secion titles and page titles. All the normal text is missing and replaced by some random characters. Printing with both CUPS's PDF printer and an actual printer results in the same output.

Printing with gv works correctly. I am not sure if it is a bug in evince or in poppler.

This bug is not present in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic; I have not tested either 8.10 Intrepid or 9.04 Jaunty.

[1] http://www.national.com/an/AN/AN-1515.pdf

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Oct 21 21:11:20 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince
Package: evince 2.22.2-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
 LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-24-generic i686

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Looking at the attachments in this bug report, I noticed that "Test case PDF file printed from Hardy's evince" was flagged as a patch. A patch contains changes to an Ubuntu package that will resolve a bug, since this was not one I've unchecked the patch flag for it. In the future keep in mind the definition of a patch. You can learn more about what qualifies as a patch at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Patches. Thanks!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, the issue is fixed in the current ubuntu version so closing it, an hardy task could be opened if the bug was planned to fixed there but that's a minor issue and nobody requested the change in over a year so it's probably not a bug which qualify for a stable update there

[Danilo Piazzalunga (danilopiazza)]

After further testing, it looks like a strange or subtly corrupted PDF file. Karmic's ghostscript has trouble with it, too:

$ pdf2ps AN-1515.pdf
Error: /rangecheck in --run--
Operand stack:
   --dict:9/18(L)-- --dict:13/15(ro)(L)-- 105 i -string-
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1862 1 3 %oparray_pop 1861 1 3 %oparray_pop 1845 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 1 12 --nostringval-- %for_pos_int_continue --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- %array_continue --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push --nostringval-- %loop_continue --nostringval-- %finish_show --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 12 11 1 --nostringval-- (gs_show_enum) %op_show_continue
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1152/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:1/20(G)-- --dict:75/200(L)-- --dict:75/200(L)-- --dict:106/127(ro)(G)-- --dict:285/300(ro)(G)-- --dict:23/25(L)-- --dict:4/6(L)-- --dict:22/40(L)-- --dict:1/1(ro)(G)-- --dict:10/15(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
GPL Ghostscript 8.70: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

Converting it to postscript with poppler's pdftops produces a PS file which ghostscript cannot convert back to PDF.