evince doesn't render embedded font

[Dennis van Dok]

I have some documents originating from Microsoft Word, with embedded subsetted fonts. These fonts are not rendered (leaving blank areas) in evince. The program prints several messages on stderr, indicating a problem with fonts:

some font thing failed
Error: failed to load truetype font

The document is rendered correctly by acroread.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: evince 3.2.1-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Nov 10 23:07:23 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=nl_NL:nl:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-16 (24 days ago)

[Dennis van Dok (dvandok-gmail)]

Attached is the document that fails to render.

I've observed the same issue with evince on Ubuntu 10.04.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

This may be related to apparmor. What are the contents of /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d/ubuntu? If it is all comments, can you update it to have:

@{HOMEDIRS}+=/private/home/

Then perform:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor force-reload

[Dennis van Dok (dvandok-gmail)]

I did as you suggested (the file was indeed all comments), but it didn't remedy the problem. I still can't see the body fonts in the failing pdf.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

Dennis, can you post your /var/log/kern.log after making the change?

[Dennis van Dok (dvandok-gmail)]

Sure, here it is. I've clipped the less relevant parts.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

Thanks Dennis. Your changes indicate that apparmor is not the main problem (though it was certainly blocking you at first :). Unassigning myself so someone from the desktop team can take over.

[Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou (nickie-7)]

I don't know whose problem it is, but by adding this line in /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince, in section for /usr/bin/evince, it seems to be solved. Of course, you need to replace the directory with the one containing your files...

  # Fonts, stow, WTF??? nickie
  /usr/local/stow/win-ttf/share/fonts/** r,

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Kevin Cole (kjcole)]

With my document (a tax document I'd rather not share), evince fails to render the text, showing various odd lines, shadings, etc. in place of the text. I *think* xpdf renders it correctly for about 3 seconds, and then crashes. For the few seconds I see it, it appears correct. Adobe Acrobat Reader (acroread) has no problem with it on a 32-bit system, but I really don't want to clutter my 64-bit system with all of the 32-bit libraries for a single application.

[Scott Kostyshak (scott-kostyshak)]

I can reproduce this bug by trying to open the pdf failing.pdf (posted earlier). Note that it appears fine to my eyes but the error messages to STDERR and the apparmor entries in kern.log show that there is a problem. It must be that the problem font is just not used in many parts of this particular PDF.

In another document, I can see no text. I cannot upload it because of private information.

Adding the line
/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/** r,
to the
/usr/bin/evince
block solves the problem.

I can reproduce starting from a fresh install of Ubuntu 13.10 with the following:
sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/scottkosty/install-tl-ubuntu
 cd install-tl-ubuntu
sudo ./install-tl-ubuntu
# restart computer
evince failing.pdf

Note that ./install-tl-ubuntu could take an hour or so to install. But I just wanted to give a way to reproduce from a fresh install in case someone looks here.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

Thanks Scott for the feedback. This rule:
  /usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/** r,

is not really something we'll add to the shipped profile because it is site specific. However, this rule can be added to /etc/apparmor.d/local/usr.bin.evince, which is intended for site-specific modifications to the profile.. Updating this file instead of /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince also means you will not have upgrade prompts and your changes will be preferred across upgrades.