evince: Bad PDF rendering: invalid font scale

[Charles Baylis]

[Impact]

* Many PDFs do not display correctly, including the boarding passes from a
  major European airline.

* Printing a boarding pass is a common simple task which users expect to
  work, and therefore should be fixed in the stable release.

* See upstream bug report for discussion about the mechanism of the fix.

[Test Case]

* Attempt to view the test case in the linked upstream bug using 'evince
  attachment.pdf'.

* Observe corrupted text displayed.

[Regression Potential]

* Theoretically, other PDFs which currently display correctly could be displayed incorrectly after this change, but is intended to emulate acroread, so this is unlikely.

* Patch has been reviewed and committed upstream, so should be safe.

[Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod)]

Created attachment 98133
easyjet boarding pass not rendered correctly

Hello, the attached PDF (easyjet boarding pass) is not correctly rendered under poppler (evince).
I am using Ubuntu 14.04 amd64, so evince 3.10.3 and poppler 0.24.5.

Evince prints a lot of messages like:
Syntax Warning: font matrix not invertible<0a>

while ghostscript renders the PDF correctly, but prints lots of:
   **** Warning: Invalid 0.0 font scale given for Tf ****
   **** Warning: /BBox has zero width or height, which is not allowed.

so I suspect the PDF is defective, but poppler should be made more "fault tolerant" as ghostscript does.
Otherwise, no boarding pass print anymore :-(

I can fix the PDF with
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

Looks good in okular so it must be a cairo backend bug.

[Davide Capodaglio (davidecapod)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Looks good in okular so it must be a cairo backend bug.

Yeah also for me in okular is ok. And no log messages on stdout at all.

[Martin McDowell (martin-mcdowell)]

I am seeing the same problem using the Document Viewer 3.10.3 on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit

[Adrian Johnson (ajohnson-redneon)]

Created attachment 107478
cairo: don't render text when matrix is not invertable

[Carlos Garcia Campos (carlosgc)]

Comment on attachment 107478
cairo: don't render text when matrix is not invertable

Review of attachment 107478:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

LGTM, thanks!

[Adrian Johnson (ajohnson-redneon)]

Pushed.

[Neil-uy4g6 (neil-uy4g6)]

*** Bug 83155 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, I am closing it because the bug has been fixed in the latest development version of Ubuntu - Vivid Vervet.

This is a significant bug in Ubuntu. If you need a fix for the bug in previous versions of Ubuntu, please perform as much as possible of the SRU Procedure [1] to bring the need to a developer's attention.

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The commited fix was http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/commit/?id=cbf2652c483d7010fc36191c8b209a57eeec93d8

[Charles Baylis (cbaylis)]

I would like this bug to be considered for a Stable Release Update to 14.04 (and 14.10 if applicable)

[Impact]

 * Many PDFs do not display correctly, including the boarding passes from a major European airline

 * Printing a boarding pass is a common simple task which users expect to work, and therefore should be fixed in the stable release.

 * see upstream bug report for discussion about the mechanism of the fix.

[Test Case]

 * attempt to view the test case in the linked upstream bug using 'evince attachment.pdf'

 * observe corrupted text displayed

[Regression Potential]

 * theoretically, other PDFs which currently display correctly could be displayed incorrectly after this change, but is intended to emulate acroread, so this is unlikely.

 * patch has been reviewed and committed upstream, so should be safe

[Other Info]

 * none

[Martin McDowell (martin-mcdowell)]

It has been a year since a last post of this bug but I am still getting this problem in October 2015. I have Ubuntu 14.04. The PDF is viewed in the default Evince document viewer 3.10.3

[Adrian Johnson (ajohnson-redneon)]

(In reply to Martin McDowell from comment #8)
> It has been a year since a last post of this bug but I am still getting this
> problem in October 2015. I have Ubuntu 14.04. The PDF is viewed in the
> default Evince document viewer 3.10.3

The fix is in poppler 0.28 released in Nov 2014.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I'm doing a SRU to 14.04 for that change

[Chris J Arges (arges)]

Hello Charles, or anyone else affected,

Accepted poppler into trusty-proposed. The package will build now and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/0.24.5-2ubuntu4.3 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug, mentioning the version of the package you tested, and change the tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

[Rohan "HEXcube" Villoth (hexcube)]

I installed and tested all packages (libpoppler-glib8, libpoppler-qt5-1, libpoppler44 and poppler-utils ) from the new patched v0.24.5-2ubuntu4.3 poppler in the proposed repo. They're verified to work properly on Ubuntu 14.04LTS "Trusty Tahr" and renders the sample pdf file without error.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package poppler - 0.24.5-2ubuntu4.3

---------------
poppler (0.24.5-2ubuntu4.3) trusty; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/git_matrix_not_invertable.patch:
    - cairo: don't render text when text matrix is not invertable
      (lp: #1412916)

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Tue, 13 Oct 2015 16:10:18 +0100

[Chris J Arges (arges)]

The verification of the Stable Release Update for poppler has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regressions.