Evince replaces bullet by infinity symbol

[André Ventura]

Binary package hint: fontconfig

Ubuntu lucid (development branch) 10.04
fontconfig: 2.8.0-2ubuntu1
libpoppler5: 0.12.4-0ubuntu2
evince: 2.30.0-0ubuntu1
---

Evince replaces the bullet symbol by an infinity symbol.

$ fc-match Symbol
symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "Regular"

A workaround is adding this code to /etc/fonts/local.conf and the bullets would appear:

<match target="pattern">
 <test name="family">
  <string>Symbol</string>
 </test>
 <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="same">
  <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
 </edit>
</match>

$ fc-match Symbol
s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Can you attach the output of pdffonts for the problem file? If you can attach the actual file as well that would be even better.

[André Ventura (afv)]

pdffonts output:

name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
Courier Type 1 no no no 130 0
Courier-Bold Type 1 no no no 135 0
Symbol Type 1 no no yes 149 0
ArialMT TrueType no no no 131 0
LOHKFK+CourierNewPSMT TrueType yes yes yes 136 0
Courier-Oblique Type 1 no no no 115 0
LOHKPK+TT444o00 Type 1C yes yes no 116 0

PDF attached.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

There is not much we can do in Ubuntu. None of the fonts are provided with the distribution and you did the right thing and fontconfig match font files correctly (since 'Symbol' is closer to 'Symbol' than 'Standard Symbols L')

But if you want a portable document with specific fonts and depending on your pdf authoring tool, you should embed the font in the pdf (only a subset to avoid huge documents) Acrobat Distiller (which seems to be the tool that generated this document) provide this kind of feature IIRC.

Can we close this report ?

[SabreWolfy (sabrewolfy)]

Confirmed in Lucid 32 bit using Times New Roman and Free Serif fonts in a PDF generated by OpenOffice.org Writer 3.2.

The standard bullet symbol appearing Writer as a bullet and renders as a bullet when viewed with Acroread 9.3.1 but as an infinity symbol in Evince 2.30.3.

[SabreWolfy (sabrewolfy)]

The document I was testing with in OpenOffice.org was in .DOC format. I saved it as a .ODT file and then selected all text (Free Serif) and changed the bullet in OpenOffice.org Writer to a diamond symbol. I then selected all text again and changed the symbol back to a bullet and it now renders correctly in Evince.

[Chemroydal Tissue (chemroyd)]

Confirmed in Lucid 64-bit using Garamond font in a PDF created with OO.org Writer 3.2. Opened a .doc file, exported it as .pdf, and viewed with Evince 2.30.3. When one copies/pastes the infinity symbol back into OO.org Writer, it displays as a bullet. Editing /etc/fonts/local.conf as above fixed the problem.

[Glen Mehn (gmehn)]

Confirmed in Lucid 64-bit, using OOO 3.2's export to pdf function. Rather annoying, but good to know it's in Evince and not my CVs that I'm sending out to prospective hires!

[madbiologist (me-again)]

The document attached to comment #2 is displaying fine here on Maverick 32bit, with evince 2.32.0-0ubuntu1 and poppler 0.14.3-0ubuntu1.1

I am getting the following:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ fc-match Symbol
Symbol.pfb: "Symbol" "Regular"

SabreWolfy, Chemroydal Tissue and Glen Mehn - can you test with the Maverick Live CD?

[Iain Parris (ipv2)]

This solution worked for me (from <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/533394>, <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.2/+bug/593361>, <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/162111>):

sudo apt-get remove ttf-symbol-replacement

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for fontconfig (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]