Evince does not display some fonts: "Error: could not create type1 face some font thing failed" - okular, epdfview and zathura also affected by this issue.

[Michael Mess]

Some documents are displayed incompletely by evince.

evince, okular, epdfview, zathura are also affected by this bug. But mupdf works well.
As multiple applications are likewise affected, it seems to be an issue with a commonly used library.

Some text is missing, but this text can be marked and appears like it would be spaces only, but copy and paste works well and the correct text appears when pasted.
Thus it seems to be a problem displaying the text using the specified font.

In the shell, plenty of error messages appear: "Error: could not create type1 face some font thing failed"

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: evince 3.4.0-0ubuntu1.4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-36.57-generic 3.2.35
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-36-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jan 31 13:34:28 2013
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120822.4)
KernLog:

MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Attached screenshot showing the bug.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

The program epdfview is also affected and the document looks similar (There are some coloring differences), thus it seems to be a problem of a commonly used library.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Could be a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cairo/+bug/358698

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Attached Output of the pdffonts command.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Attached screenshot of document correctly displayed by mupdf.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

This is still occurring on Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" with evince 3.6.0-0ubuntu2 and poppler 0.20.4-0ubuntu1.1.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Testing the file DOSB_Pruefungswegweiser_Komplett_web_11_12.pdf with various pdf viewers listed on http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/PDF

 * evince: Affected
 * okular: Affected
 * epdfview: Affected
 * firefox: (very slow pdf viewer) Does not work at all
 * mupdf: works
 * xpdf: Crashes with Segmentation fault
 * qpdfview: (not available in Ubuntu 12.04)
 * zathura: Affected

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Created Bug for xpdf (Crash): Bug 1184328

This might be interesting here, because...
 * The crash SIGSEGV in GlobalParams::findFontFile() could have the same reason like the problem in evince, but evince seems to handle it better.
 * xpdf uses libpoppler19 0.18.4-1ubuntu3.1, but not libcairo.
 * evince uses
   - libpoppler-glib8 0.18.4-1ubuntu3
   - libpoppler19 0.18.4-1ubuntu3
   - libcairo-gobject2 1.10.2-6.1ubuntu3
   - libcairo2 1.10.2-6.1ubuntu3

Maybe this is libpoppler19 0.18.4-1ubuntu3.1 related.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Could be also related to fontconfig-config 2.8.0-3ubuntu9.1 and libfontconfig1 2.8.0-3ubuntu9.1 which is not used by mupdf which has no issues displaying the document, but used by xpdf (Bug 1184328) and evince, epdfview, okular and zathura (this bug).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

Maybe related to: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71141

[Michael Mess (michael-michaelmess)]

After upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

Testing the file DOSB_Pruefungswegweiser_Komplett_web_11_12.pdf with various pdf viewers again after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

 * evince: OK
 * okular: OK
 * epdfview: OK
 * xpdf: OK
 * zathura: OK

Thus this bug seem to be fixed with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.