Cannot save/copy images properly from evince

[Matteo Settenvini]

Using latest Hardy, on many PDFs I cannot save or copy the correct image (that is to say, almost all of the ones I've tried). If PDF image-saving support is so buggy, it should be temporarily disabled in the final Hardy release instead that kept there as a half-working feature -- at least imho.

In the attached test-case (even if quite ugly, I just took some random images lying there on my hard disk), try copying/saving the images you see into e.g. OpenOffice.org Writer. There are a lot of issues:

* Transparent PNGs are rendered with a black background.
* If you try to select the image on the background (the one with the flag), you probably get any of the other images saved instead. For example, try in the upper-right corner of the picture, where you see the blue sky. No image is stacked above that area, neither a transparent one.
* Then there's the transparence issue: try copying the image in space labeled as "A". You don't get the chest, but the image of the zealot. Transparence should be taken in account and images with alpha 255 on a particular point (where you do your right click) ignored in the z-stack -- users expect the chest to be copied, because that's what they see.

Probably at least part of this gets fixed by updating poppler to 0.8.0 for Hardy. See also GNOME bug #310008.
I can attach other test-cases if needed, I should be able to find easily something under a CC license.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for your report.

[Matteo Settenvini (tchernobog)]

It may be interesting bumping to poppler 0.8.1.
Attached is the "debian" sub-directory of my poppler-0.8.1 package, downloadable from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.1.tar.gz

I then just took care of rebuilding packages I wanted using the new library; for me they were evince, inkscape, tracker and gimp. Maybe it's only me, but I noticed a speedup when rendering PDFs.

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

matteo, could you please provide those packages (maybe in a PPA), as I (and maybe others) am not able to do these kind of things?

[Matteo Settenvini (tchernobog)]

Hi, I finally managed to upload on my PPA the new poppler libraries; a build of evince 2.22.1.1 using this version of poppler should be ready in an hour or so.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tchernobog/ubuntu hardy main

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

I have tested Evince 2.22.1.1 poppler 0.8.2 (cairo), thanks to matteo, and some bugs are fixed indeed, but not everything. For example, I just had to try out some other files such as this one to stumble on problems. Try saving all the images of that file: some of them will, some won't (cannot be dragged, or no popup menu option). For an easy example, at the last page, the bottom-right image can be saved, but the 3 other images around it cannot.

On page 18, some of the images can be saved, others can not.

Also, sometimes some images are saved "flipped vertically" (but I'm not sure if that is a bug, as it happened only with the PDFs from that particular author).

Moreover, sometimes you can only save with right-clicking, you cannot drag and drop for some really strange reason. For example, on page 3, try drag and dropping the ugly faces. Sometimes they will work, and sometimes they will *stop working*. Really weird.

Actually, I have found how to reproduce this. Initiate a drag operation, then drop immediately in the middle of nowhere (inside evince for example). Then, you won't be able to drag *anything* from the PDF again, until you have switched to another window/application and come back. Not 100% reliable to trigger, but easy nonetheless.

So, in short, there seems to be 2-3 bugs hiding in there.

[TimH (biotim)]

a small issue I've noticed: when I save an image as "filename.png" (with filetype chosen by extension) it gets saved as "filename.png.png"

[Yogu (yogu)]

Transparent PNGs are still copied with black background.

[Yogu (yogu)]

However, as I just found out, the transparency is preserved when you drag-dop images.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Official support for Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" has ended. On Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr", I can save all the images from the last page of the document attached to comment #6.

If this issue is still occurring on Ubuntu 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" please run ubuntu-bug to file a new bug report so that we can get a fresh set of log files and system info.