Comment 28 for bug 227186

> It is a limitation of the cairo backend of poppler that it can't print
> Type 3 fonts nicely. When cairo 1.8 is released with the new user-font
> API it will be possible to fix this in poppler. Cairo user-fonts are
> embedded in PS/PDF as a Type 3 font.

Although I generally use xpdf/poppler for reading PDFs and evince only
for forms, I am available to help test if you are willing to increase
poppler master’s required cairo version to either cairo/master or the
current pre-release (1.7.6) and start using the user-font API on master
now rather than after cairo makes its 1.8.0 release.

(I find this to be an intriguing bug to quash.)