evince does not draw first or last page of PDF

Bug #480027 reported by Malte Helmert
16
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Evince
Fix Released
Low
evince (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: evince

Note: I found some old bugs that look related (e.g. #383309), but this one is different in that it's *not* about presentation mode. Presentation mode works fine for me.

When I open any PDF with evince, it often fails to redraw when I move to the first or last page. See the attached screenshot: I just clicked on page 1 on the side pane, and evince thinks it's displaying page 1 (see the form at the top saying page 1 out of 10), but actually it is displaying page 2 (as the page contents say). This happens not just when clicking in the side pane, but also when navigating with PageUp/PageDown, although it doesn't happen *every time* I navigate to page 1, and I don't understand the exact conditions.

Steps to reproduce (for me):

1. Open the attached PDF with evince.
2. In the "View" options, enable "Toolbar", "Side Pane" and "Best Fit". Disable everything else.
(Actually, "Toolbar" and "Side Pane" don't seem to matter, but disabling "Continuous mode" is important.)
3. Go to page 1 if not already there.
4. Press PageDown. (Page 2 displays now.)
5. Press PageUp. (Page 2 still displays, although evince says it's displaying page 1.)

Clicking Page 1 now or trying to get it to display some other way doesn't work at this point; the only way I can get it to display is by pressing Ctrl-R.

Same problem with the last page: if I navigate to the last page (page 10) to display, then go up, then down again, it still displays page 9 although it says it's displaying page 10.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Nov 10 15:01:31 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince
KernLog:

Package: evince 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: evince
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686

Revision history for this message
Malte Helmert (helmert) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Malte Helmert (helmert) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Malte Helmert (helmert) wrote :

Update: I tried to reproduce it on a colleague's machine (who is also on karmic and uses the same version of evince), and I can't reproduce it the same way. However, I can reproduce it on both machines like this:

1. Open the PDF attached to the original bug report with evince.
2. In the "View" options, enable "Toolbar", "Side Pane" and "Best Fit". Disable everything else.
3. Go to page 1 if not already there.
4. Keep PageDown pressed (i.e. hold it down) until the page doesn't change any more.

On both of our machines, this ends up showing us page 9, but claiming it is page 10.

Revision history for this message
Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense) wrote :

Thank you for helping with making Ubuntu and Evince a little bit better by reporting this bug. I've tried to reproduce this bug, but two other people and I couldn't reproduce it with the provided PDF file.

Is there any other possible condition that could trigger this bug? An application you installed, but we don't run, a different setting, or a different library? If you could come up with something, please tell us so we can try again.

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Malte Helmert (helmert) wrote :

The main machine I'm working with was originally a from-scratch jaunty install that was upgraded to karmic using the update manager. Nothing special installed there, only packages that are in the default repository. I'll try on some other machines with the karmic live CD to see if I can reproduce it anywhere else. (Will probably take a few days, though.)

In case it helps for reproducing this, I've found in the past that evince misbehaved more often when I pressed keys *quickly* rather than waiting after each keypress, suggesting that there might be some sort of timing issue or race condition involved. For example, I get problems much more frequently if I press PageDown and then *very very quickly* PageUp. Having said that, sometimes the problem does show up even when I do things very slowly.

In my experience, once a given document shows display faults for the first time, they tend to pop up regularly in the future for that document, even if I close and reopen evince. Is there some sort of information cached between evince runs that I can delete to see if that makes a difference?

Regarding evince settings, it seems to be important that "Continuous" and "Presentation" are switched *off* and that "Best Fit" is switched on, or at least that the current zoom factor displays a full page without scrolling. All other settings ("Toolbar", "Side Pane", "Fullscreen", "Dual") don't seem to matter; I can get the display problems with them on or off. Having said that, I think I've seen problems more frequently with the Side Pane enabled.

Revision history for this message
Jan Claeys (janc) wrote :

I can somewhat confirm this bug with the instructions given by Malte.

Keeping PgDn pressed until I reach page 10, it's still page 9 which is shown, scrolling back up, when I reach page 1, page 2 is still shown. But clicking on the page or losing focus or just waiting (maybe for some random event?) seems to result in page 1 / 10 to be displayed.

No need to chose "best fit" , it's also visible with "100%", and the sidebar isn't needed either.

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Triaged
status: Triaged → New
status: New → Triaged
status: Triaged → New
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense) wrote :

This is now fixed upstream in master and the gnome-2-28 branch.

Revision history for this message
Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

This should be fixed in Ubuntu 10.04 now. Thanks for reporting.

Changed in evince (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Changed in evince:
importance: Unknown → Low
status: Unknown → Fix Released
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