Evince/Okular displays incorrect characters

[Alex Forencich]

When using evince/okular to display a PDF file, all degree signs (°) are rendered as a character that looks like ϒ, but selecting it and copying the relevant text, copying, and pasting into another application yields the correct character. Also, mu (μ) is rendered as the proportional to symbol, ∝, but copies correctly as well. The same for the square root symbol, √, except it appears as a small script p, ℘. I would assume the problem is not limited to these characters.

Steps to repeat:

1. Download and open http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/ina217 in evince or okular

What happens:

'√Hz' and 'μV/°C' are displayed incorrectly, 'μV/°C' becoming '∝V/ϒC' and '√Hz' becoming '℘Hz'.

What should happen:

'√Hz' and 'μV/°C' are displayed as '√Hz' and 'μV/°C'

uname -a: Linux alexforencich-eee 2.6.31-17-generic #54-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 10 16:20:31 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
evince: 2.28.1-0ubuntu1.2
libpoppler[5,-glib4,-qt2,-qt4-3] and poppler-utils: 0.12.0-0ubuntu2.1
okular: 4:4.3.5-0bubuntu1~karmic1

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Feb 6 14:55:24 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince
Package: evince 2.28.1-0ubuntu1.2
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-generic
SourcePackage: evince
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-generic i686

[madbiologist (me-again)]

This seems to have been fixed in the latest package versions in Lucid 10.04.

Uname: Linux 2.6.32-10-generic i686
Packages: evince 2.29.5-0ubuntu1
                 poppler 0.12.3-0ubuntu1

Are you able to test with a Lucid 10.04 alpha 2 LiveCD and confirm? Note that after booting from the CD you will need to update the 3 poppler packages to the latest version.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

if you ask something to a reporter the status of the bug should be changed to incomplete, marking this as incomplete for now.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Since I tested this and it worked, I think we can mark this as Fix Released. I was just hoping to get confirmation from someone before doing so.

Pedro: If you can not confirm the fix when using the file linked to in the original bug description, feel free to set the status back to Invalid.

[pauljohn32 (pauljohn32)]

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with Evince 2.30 and I see the wrong rendering in Evince with that example document. The square root doesn't show properly, it is a little "squiggle" symbol. mu comes out as the infinity symbol that is open on the right side.

Please check page 3 in that pdf, look in the table under the column "Units". What do you see in the second large row cell.

[Budoc (budoc)]

This is still an issue for me in Ubuntu 10.10. I've attached a screenshot of the pdf file that is linked in the first comment being incorrectly rendered by evince 2.32.0-0ubuntu1 and poppler/cairo (0.14.3). The screenshot is taken from the right column in the table presented on page 3.

[Budoc (budoc)]

For comparison, this is how acroread 9.4.1-1maverick1 displays the same portion of text.

[pipe (pipatron)]

The fix here worked for me: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9784575&postcount=12

"I also had this problem, a pdf-file (probably generated in Windows-Word) shows wrong symbols for \mu, \Omega etc. To solve this I removed a package named ttf-symbol-replacement and it now works as expected. I also has a package called ttf-symbol-replacement1.3 (probably from the wine ppa) and if I install that it also works."

It's likely that all of you that are having this problem have wine installed, I think wine pulls in that package. After I removed the font, scientific symbols displays correctly in Evince.

[mogliii (mogliii)]

There seems to be a regression bug exactly as described in the currently fully patched ubuntu 16.04.

I found this problem recently with a pdf prepared by origin on windows. The file contains mu characters. I came accross this bug report, and the datasheet posted by the OP, on page 6, lower right, shows missing characters in Okular 0.24.2 with PDF Backend 0.6.5. (I am attaching no images, one by okular and one by Firefox). Evince also renders wrongly.

libpoppler is 0.41.0-0ubuntu1.1.

[mogliii (mogliii)]

Here the okular view. The mu is recognized by the select tool.

[mogliii (mogliii)]

I opened a new bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/1683268