dvipdf, evince: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap

[Martin Konôpka]

Binary package hint: evince

1.) I create a simple LaTeX document (named e.g. sample.tex) containing a vector symbol or the \nabla character:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,oneside]{report}
\begin{document}
\[
\vec{F}
\]
\end{document}

(Please note that usual characters will not produce the buggy behaviour.)

2.) compile it: latex sample.tex
3.) convert dvi file to pdf file: dvipdf sample.dvi
4.) view it running viewer from terminal: evince sample.pdf

Several lines of the error messages appear in the terminal window:

Error: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap

I am using the complete texlive installation (metapackage texlive-full).

Note that I am not the first user who complains about this bug. There is an older report which however might not been fully noticed by launchpad team because it was filed just as a comment to another bug: see bug 234413 and comment #6 in particular:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/234413/comments/6

There is also an essentially same bug report for other linux system (Fedora) which may be very useful:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=574964

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: evince 2.30.3-0ubuntu1.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.39-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Aug 20 00:09:32 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

looks like it's fixed with Maverick , followed your test case and it's working fine here with Maverick, may you please test the same and comment back? thanks in advance.

[Martin Konôpka (martin.konopka)]

Thanks for the positive news. At the moment I do not have any Maverick installation hence I can not test it right now. In near future I plan to test it in a LiveCD session (alpha3 or beta version).

[ViktigLemma (jorgsk)]

I get the same error messages from Evince with the same procedure. This must have been caused by some updates that came in August because before that I didn't get these messages on the same latex project.

[Johannes (jo-u)]

I get the same error messages when replacing step 4 by "pdftops sample.pdf":
Error: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap
Error: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap
Error: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap

"xpdf sample.pdf" produces the same error messages as well.

[Johannes (jo-u)]

I get the same error messages when doing the following steps:
1.) downloading a ps-file, for example:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/simplified-latex/simplified-intro.ps
2.) Using:
$ ps2pdf simplified-intro.ps
to create a pdf file
3.) Opening the pdf-file with evince:
$ evince simplified-intro.pdf

Maybe the bug is in the programs creating the pdf-file (dvipdf, ps2pdf)?

[Soo-Hyun Choi (s.choi)]

It looks like a bug in poppler library (i.e., libpoppler5 in Ubuntu 10.4 server edition).

I can also confirm this bug and it is still not fixed as of now (Sept 03 2010). I have found the relevant patch from: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27728

As this seems affect many users, we would be much like to get it fixed ASAP.

[Martin Konôpka (martin.konopka)]

Now I have tested the issue in a LiveCD session of ubuntu 10.10-beta i386 (Maverick Meerkat) installation. The things work correctly now, i.e. there is no such a message ("Error: Illegal entry in bfrange...") which I and the other users had reported above.

Of course, I would be happy to be able to get rid of this issue also in ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

[Soo-Hyun Choi (s.choi)]

Absolutely agree with Martin. Considering 10.04 LTS is meant to be "Long Term Support", we would like to get it fixed very soon.

[Bart Cramer (bart-cramer)]

It's an easy fix, as far as I can see. Hopefully the poppler lib will be updated soon.

[rmcd (rmcd1024)]

I would just like to add a vote for fixing this in 10.04 LTS.

[Adam Aviv (aaviv)]

There is still no backports push on this fix for lucid. What is the status? The terminal spam is driving me nuts.

[Martin Konôpka (martin.konopka)]

To circumvent this problem, I used to use pdflatex instead of latex. However, using pdflatex has its own drawbacks. For example, evince is not able to work correctly if one compiles latex source file with figures two or more times with a too short time delay between the compilations.

[Wirawan Purwanto (wirawan0)]

It's a shame that ubuntu does not release a fix to this problem yet. According to fedora/red hat bugzilla, this problem has been fixed there (FC 12, 13). What's up? 10.04 LTS and upward should have received the fix awhile back.

[Chris Dellin (cdellin)]

Bump. It seems to me that the fix has been available for some 18 months now, and it's still not fixed in the LTS. Who should I complain to? (-:

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

where is the fix available?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

in fact the upstream bug indicates it should be fixed in the current version so closing the current serie bug and making it affect lucid

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> Bump. It seems to me that the fix has been available for some 18 months now, and it's still not fixed in the LTS. Who should I complain to? (-:

Complaining will not help resolving the fact that people are busy and that they are bugs over the volunteers working on Ubuntu, you are welcome to contribute and help getting the bug fixing though, or if you want to "complain" I guess you can buy support from Canonical or a another company supporting Ubuntu and get them to work on getting it resolved

[Norbert (norbert79)]

Sebastian:
No, not really. Luckily applications with own PostScript interpreters (or where poppler is not used) are not affected by this problem: example: LibreOffice (haven't had any problems yet, or I haven't noticed), GIMP, Inkscape, Adobe Reader.
As I could read from internal forums, that it seems, that direct IP printing is not being affected by the problem; the problem comes basically from the internally used InforPrint Management service. So as an alternative choice you could try using the direct IP printing method as well.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

lucid has seen the end of its life and is no longer receiving any updates. Marking the lucid task for this ticket as "Won't Fix".