PDF imports mostly black and garbled text

[Lubomir D.]

Attached "001 COVER 24 X 36 FORCE.pdf" file is imported into Inkscape 0.48.2 mostly black and garbled.

Steps to reproduce:
- open "001 COVER 24 X 36 FORCE.pdf" in Inkscape 0.48.2
- note the file looks fine on preview windows of the dialog "PDF Import Settings"
- compare original PDF and imported image

Tested on OS: Windows 7 64bit using Inkscape Portable 0.48.2 r9819.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

> mostly black (…)

Reproduced with Inkscape 0.48.2, 0.48.4 and 0.48.x r9948 on OS X 10.7.5, not reproduced with current trunk (0.48+devel r12340).

> (…) and garbled.

Partially "garbled" text (replaced by apparently random letters) reproduced with stable 0.48.x as well as current trunk on OS X 10.7.5. IIRC we have earlier reports tracking such text/encoding issues with certain PDF files (I'll search for related reports later).

[Beluga (buovjaga)]

Poppler/Cairo import works, for what it's worth..

Arch Linux 64-bit, KDE Plasma 5
Inkscape 0.92+devel 15099 (GTK3)

[Qantas94Heavy (qantas94heavy)]

It seems the text is also garbled if you attempt to copy/paste it from Adobe Reader. This means it is likely a problem with the PDF itself and not Inkscape. Probably your best bet is to use OCR to detect the text and go from there.

As 'internal import' attempts to read the text stored, it will also display this 'garbled' text. Poppler/Cairo works as it imports the actual vector shapes, but this means you can't edit it as text.

Here's an explanation of what the problem most likely is: https://stackoverflow.com/q/2926159/2074608

Closed by: https://gitlab.com/Qantas94Heavy