evince chooses wrong font substitutes

[Matthias Klose]

Binary package hint: evince

view http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/lduncorr/s&tii210207a.pdf with evince in current gutsy without having Times NewRoman and Arial fonts installed. The metric incompatible DejaVu fonts are choosen, instead of metric compatible ones. This is a regression.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. poppler uses fontconfig to choose fonts, are you sure that's not a fontconfig issue?

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

unknown. please investigate

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you still get the issue on hardy? The example seems to render correctly

[TerryG (tgalati4)]

Test document appears to render correctly with acroread (version 8) under gutsy. Document looks OK under evince, but font kerning looks slightly mushed together. Readable, but not perfect. Only arial font installed under .playforlinux which is a wine gaming port, so I don't think its available to the general system since it's not in the path. The kerning problem is happening with the serif font (presumably Times NewRoman.

Triaged as Confirmed. Work around is to use acroread.

[TerryG (tgalati4)]

Marked to Confirmed since I was able to replicate the problem. Example provided by reporter is typical of what many folks are experiencing with evince and the suspected kerning problem (font is pushed together).

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

again setting a milestone

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Is this still an issue with current hardy? I don't see any rendering issues with the sample document. I don't have the Microsoft fonts installed; I do have subpixel smoothing and full hinting enabled.

If someone is still seeing this issue with the sample document, please provide:
 - a more precise description of how the font selection breaks the document display
 - the settings from System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts -> Details
 - the output of "dpkg -l '*ttf-*'|grep ^ii"

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

the correct fonts are choosen in hardy. I am unsure what people do mean by the "kerning problem".

[SK (stephantom)]

I am not so sure whether this is the same or a related issue:
The PDF document attached is displayed by libpoppler based viewers (I tested evince and epdfview) with all bold and cursive text.
Note that the documents suggests the fonts "Courier" and "Courier-Oblique" (both are no embedded).

$ fc-match "Courier"
n022003l.pfb: "Nimbus Mono L" "Regular"

Nimbus Mono L Regular would be a perfect substitute, since I don't have a font named 'Courier'.
Although the viewer uses a font that looks like Nimbus (and most likely is), but renders all text in bold and oblique.

Compare this to the rendering of xpdf (which does handle this correctly).

Since the correct font is suggested by fontconfig, I am almost sure that this must be an issue with libpoppler handling something the wrong way.

[Jeff Muizelaar (jeff-infidigm)]

This bug is likely the following upstream bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12304 for which there is an upstream patch.

[Ulrich Lukas (ulrich-lukas)]

Perhaps this is related to this issue:

Opening
> http://www.rockwellautomation.ch/applications/gs/emea/gsch.nsf/4a87ff3bf2c03cc38525646f0072ffa9/05fa4296bf773768cc25707300199eab/$FILE/RAAMP-Prospekt_D_final.pdf

in KPDF and Adobe Reader shows very different results:
interwoven, or nested, letters for parts of the document (headings) in KPDF;
correct displayed in Adobe Reader.

Additionally, despite the document is scaled to 183% both times, the screen size is different.

Screenshots attached.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

bug 12304 upstream is bug 185251 on Ubuntu which was fixed already, could somebody having the issue send it upstream? thanks in advance.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

ping any news about it?

[Rogério Theodoro de Brito (rbrito)]

Since I'm trying to get things better with evince, I'm triaging (and filing) some bugs.

I'm not seeing the problem with the attached documents here, with karmic (freshly updated). Everything seems to work fine (kerning etc).

I guess that this could be closed.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

[SK (stephantom)]

I am not seeing this issue in Evince 2.26.2 (using poppler 0.10.7 (cairo)).

[Greg Grossmeier (greg.grossmeier)]

Based on the last two comments I am closing this bug report. If this is still an issue for anyone using an up-to-date Karmic install, please feel free to reopen this bug.

Thanks!

[scruss (scruss)]

Still present in Ubuntu 14.10. Evince is substituting vastly incorrect fonts. DejaVu-Serif for Times-Roman is forgivable through ignorance, but Liberation Sans for ZapfDingbats is in “what is this I don't even” country.