Font problem when opening PDF created in Mathematica

[Sergey Slizovskiy]

When I try to convert the PDF file to open it in Inkscape 0.48.4 (tested on Ubuntu Linux 11.10, 13.10, 14.04), some symbols like "/" , power 2 and others
are missing (see e.g. the axes labels).

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Inkscape 0.48?

[su_v (suv-lp)]

The missing (or incorrectly interpreted) glyphs ('/', '(', ')') use the font 'Mathematica2'. The text renders as expected in Inkscape if the font is installed on the local system.

Tested with Inkscape 0.48.5 and current trunk r13674 on OS X 10.7.5.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Screenshots Inkscape 0.48.5:
- left: Mathematica fonts are not installed
- right: Mathematica2 installed and used by Inkscape

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

Yes, 0.48.4
I will try with fonts now. Strange that these are not installed automatically with Mathematica

[su_v (suv-lp)]

IIRC I had downloaded the fonts (Mathematica 8) from here:
http://support.wolfram.com/kb/10427

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

Thank you! But so far I did not succeed. I downloaded Linux fonts for Mathematica 9, copied them to /usr/share /fonts,
run sudo fc-cache . (as described in http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_fonts ) Still not working.

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

I have checked that the font Mathematica2 is present in Inkscape and I can write with it.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

It might depend on which version of poppler is installed: I noticed that the same Inkscape versions (stable or trunk) compiled with older dependencies don't import the glyphs as expected (the glyphs are missing, even if the font is installed).

Works for me:
- poppler 0.28.1, poppler 0.26.5

Doesn't work:
- poppler 0.22.1, poppler, 0.18.4

AFAICT Ubuntu 14.04 ships poppler 0.24.5. It could be any other dependency (or combination thereof) though (poppler seems a good candidate since it plays a major role in PDF import).

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Attaching SVG files saved with same Inkscape trunk revision (r13674),
using different poppler versions.

The one created with the older poppler has the glyphs missing, otherwise
the files are identical …

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

Thanks! On 24.5 Poppler it does not works. So, I will try to compile the 28 version.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

@ScislaC - according to <http://packages.ubuntu.com/utopic/libpoppler46> Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic has poppler 0.26.5. Can you confirm that opening the PDF file on Utopic in Inkscape (stable or trunk), with 'Mathematica2' installed, works as expected (without missing glyphs, renders the same as the PDF)?

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

I have poppler 0.24.5 on Ubuntu 14.04 (=Mint 17). I experience problems to compile poppler 0.28 since running ./configure gives a error: Package requirements (fontconfig >= 2.0.0) were not met:
No package 'fontconfig' found
(while I have this package, ver 2.11 )

[ScislaC (scislac)]

I do not see the issue in 0.48.5 on Ubuntu 14.10 with that font installed.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

On 2014-11-07 20:57 (+0100), Sergey Slizovskiy wrote:
> I experience problems to compile poppler 0.28

I'm not convinced you should attempt to install a custom poppler version: you'd have to recompile inkscape too, to run it with a newer poppler version. Poppler is tricky since it chances its abi version even in dot releases - if you replace the system poppler version installed by the distro with a custom one, you risk breaking a lot more than just Inkscape. Additionally, inkscape makes use of private headers (you'd have to make sure to configure and install poppler with xpdf headers).

Maybe you could try Ubuntu 14.10 in a VM?

Please note that so far there is no confirmation that upgrading poppler is solving the problem … there could be other dependencies involved. Please don't risk breaking your system in order to prove that the reported issue is actually an upstream bug in older poppler versions ;-)

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Sorry, didn't see ScislaC's reply (thx!) - maybe if you really need to have such PDFs handled correctly, a VM with Ubuntu 14.10 would be the easiest solution?

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

Thank you, I will try! Anyway, I got into some deeper bugs trying to make poppler.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Upstream bug (as far as we can tell with poppler < 0.26), can be closed as 'Invalid' once major distros ship with newer poppler versions (>= 0.26) and Inkscape's Windows packages include newer poppler too.

Windows devlibs 32bit: poppler 0.12.1
Windows devlibs 64bit: poppler 0.24.2

The current OS X package (0.48.5) includes a more recent poppler version (0.26.3) and is not affected.

[Sergey Slizovskiy (sereza)]

Yes, I confirm that it works on Ubuntu 14.10.
Thanks everyone for help!