Document Viewer renders PDF text highlighting incorrectly

[Ryan Prior]

Binary package hint: evince

Steps to reproduce the bug:
> Open a suitable PDF file, like the one attached to this bug (BurtonGroupResponseFinal.pdf)
> Scroll to a suitable section of text, like the one shown in the attached screen shot
> Highlight some text, as shown in the attached screen shot
> Look carefully at the letters before and after highlighting

Expected results:
> The document should look the same whether it is being highlighted or not
> No new characters should be shown
> No letters should be replaced
> The shapes of the letters should be unchanged

Actual results:
> The document looks different when highlighted
> Strange characters not displayed in the unhighlighted document are displayed
> Some letters are replaced with other letters or with gibberish
> The shapes of letters are changed, cutting off the bottom of tall letters

For a clear example of a PDF file that exhibits these behaviors and screen shots showing the highlighted text rendering incorrectly, see the attachments to this bug.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

Notice that in addition to the expected behaviour of the text's background turning orange, there is unexpected behaviour. The bottoms of the letters are cut off, the word Even is replaced with the characters gfna, and the characters ." are replaced with the characters yW.

[Matthew Woerly (nattgew)]

I get the same thing. The letters are cut off by the highlighting on the line below, but the "gfna" is just really odd...

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

The latest round of Evince updates didn't change this bug's behaviour.

[TerryG (tgalati4)]

Confirmed with gutsy and evince 2.20.1, but acroread 8 works OK on the same passage.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Have you tested the pdf with another pdf reader like acrobat or xpdf ? does they show the same results?

[TerryG (tgalati4)]

Marked to Confirmed. Acroread works OK on passage. xpdf does not have line-by-line selection so you can't replicate behavior.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

The bug is still in the latest Hardy Evince, 2.21.91

[FERkEL (the-ferkel)]

I have a similar problem with 2.20.1.
The highlighted text is replaced by some "boxes". (see screenshot)

Also copy/pate into a texteditor does not work corectly.

The pdf file was created with pdflatex.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

I hadn't thought to try copy and paste. However, the section of BurtonGroupReportFinal.pdf that I attached to this bug copies and pastes fine into Gedit, the way that would be expected.

I think the copy-and-paste problem is probably a different bug.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. Also reassigning to poppler.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

If the bug is already reported, then it is a duplicate, not invalid. Please link this bug to the already-reported one so that we can track its progress.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Hello Ryan, you're more than welcome to help us with that task since we have to deal with thousand of bugs daily and since you're part of the bugsquad you probably know that, next time please do not re open the bugs rather help us to find the exactly number, thanks.