EVINCE, KPDF, ePDFviewer, and KGhostView cannot display any Japanese characters in PDF documents, when XPDF (with the xpdf-japanese plugin) can do it.

[YannUbuntu]

Binary package hint: evince

EVINCE, KPDF, ePDFviewer, and KGhostView cannot display any Japanese characters in some PDF documents (like the one I attached with this post), when XPDF (with the xpdf-japanese plugin) can do it.

CONFIG:
I have Ubuntu 7.10 and Evince 2.20.1-0ubuntu1.
language-pack-gnome-ja , french and english

Thanks to all volunteers !!!

ウブンツが大好き！！！

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Mar 1 14:16:34 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince
Package: evince 2.20.1-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcCmdline: evince file:///home/yyy/Bureau/rikon_zaisanbunyo.pdf
ProcCwd: /home/yyy
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evince
Uname: Linux yyy-laptop 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

[David Nemeskey (nemeskeyd)]

I can confirm this. I am using kpdf and when opening files such as the one above, it just displays garbage. Maybe it is an encoding problem, but since there is no way to set the encoding in kpdf, I am stuck.

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

I also tried to test with Acrobat Reader, but I can find the way to install the Japanese Language Pack. If someome can help me...

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

I also tried to test with Acrobat Reader, but I can find the way to install the Japanese Language Pack. If someone can help me...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, could you install poppler-data on hardy and try again?

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

Thanks for your answer, I will check it this weekend.

Here is another file ("applicationJP.pdf) that can't be displayed with NONE of the Ubuntu viewers (NEITHER XPDF in this case). I had to open it with AcrobatReader+JapPack on WindowsXP. It's not the first time that happens to me. I'm surprised that Japanese users didn't report this bug before. Please could you check with the Japanese LoCo Team?

In my previous post, I meant "I canNOT find a way to install AcrobatReader8 Japanese pack" (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrasianfontpackthanks.html?hasjavascript=0&Version=Adobe+Reader+8&Language=Japanese&Platform=Linux) --> please could you help me?

[David Nemeskey (nemeskeyd)]

I have a similar PDF (which unfortunately I cannot share), and neither Evince nor KPDF could display it. xpdf did, luckily.

I installed poppler-data, and as a result, KPDF indeed displayed the document differently. However, by no means would I say that it displayed it correctly. Most of the text just disappeared, and of the rest, some words were readable, but most of it remained gibberish.

Strange that such a bug would only get low importance. Nobody is using Ubuntu in Japan?

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

I confirmed the bug for Gutsy.

However, on Hardy it's working with EVINCE, KPDF, and ePDFviewer (not KGhostView: blank pages) ON CONDITION that I install "poppler-data" as Sebastien Bacher said.
So as an improvement for Hardy, I suggest that:
the "poppler-data" library should be added into the Japanese langage packages dependencies.

Thanks for any answer.

[David Nemeskey (nemeskeyd)]

For me it doesn't work. I am using Kubuntu Hardy. I tried the linked file, and I can see only numbers in KPDF. Screenshot in the attachment.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could anybody having a clue about japanese rendering open the bug upstream on bugs.freedesktop.org, I will not sent the bug there since I'm not able to reply to questions about what should be rendered there

[David Nemeskey (nemeskeyd)]

Sebastian: has the bug been created on freedesktop.org? If not, then I daresay the "pull" model doesn't work. Couldn't you just assign the bug to someone responsible for Japanese support?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

May someone having the issue and a japanese enviroment open the bug upstream at bugs.freedesktop.org? leaving this as incomplete until that.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

Hola Pedro, what is the "japanese rendering" info that you need? how can we provide it?

For information, the bug still exists on Intrepid, and "poppler-data" does NOT improve anything any more.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

As my latest comment i stated that somebody with a japanese environment needs to forward this upstream since the upstream developers are probably going to ask for more info regarding the rendering i don't have a japanese env and have no idea about symbols, so please can someone forward it? thanks.

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

I am not sure about what you mean by "rendering"... if it is a screenshot of what should be displayed, here it is in attached file.

[Terry 'Mongoose' Hendrix (mongooseichiban)]

I had the same issue in 9.04, but installing libpoppler-data resolved it. Japanese rendering in PDFs worked fine in my Japanese / English environment in 8.10 before the upgrade.

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

according to roderich.schupp ATT googlemail ,

> The reason is that Debian and Ubuntu don't package poppler-data
> (http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-data-0.2.0.tar.gz) that
> contains the necessary CMap etc files. This information is also contained
> in xpdf-japanese, but installed in a place where evince (or rather poppler)
> doesn't look for it.
> I got evince to display your example pdf by unpacking the above tarball
> into /usr/share and renaming the toplevel directory to "poppler".

Isn't it a clue to find a fix ?

[bing (ingrambj)]

marked as a duplicate of #197537