evince renders fonts thinly and weakly when compared to Acrobat

Bug #59316 reported by Krzysztof Rosiński
12
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
poppler (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Evince displays ugly fonts in some pdf files. I think this is a libpoppler fault (maybe something with type1 fonts).

pdffonts says:

name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 44 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 7 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 102 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 92 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 90 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 81 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 214 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 212 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 268 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 265 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 251 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 241 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 239 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 339 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 430 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 489 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 487 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 485 0
[none] Type 3 yes no yes 480 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 478 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 476 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 474 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 472 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 463 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 529 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 514 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 549 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 546 0
Times-Bold Type 1 no no no 605 0
Helvetica-BoldOblique Type 1 no no no 600 0
Symbol Type 1 no no no 595 0
Times-BoldItalic Type 1 no no no 604 0
Courier Type 1 no no no 599 0
Times-Roman Type 1 no no no 607 0
Helvetica Type 1 no no no 603 0
Courier-Oblique Type 1 no no no 598 0
Helvetica-Oblique Type 1 no no no 602 0
Courier-Bold Type 1 no no no 597 0
Times-Italic Type 1 no no no 606 0
Helvetica-Bold Type 1 no no no 601 0
Courier-BoldOblique Type 1 no no no 596 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 625 0
[none] Type 3 yes no no 969 0

Packages installed:
ii libpoppler1 0.5.3-0ubuntu7 PDF rendering library
ii libpoppler1-glib 0.5.3-0ubuntu7 PDF rendering library (GLib-based shared lib
ii poppler-utils 0.5.3-0ubuntu7 PDF utilitites (based on libpoppler)
ii evince 0.6.0-0ubuntu1 Document (postscript, pdf) viewer

Screenshot showing this issue:
http://kr.livenet.pl/images/poppler.png

Above is from acroread, below is from evince.

Tags: evincefont
Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

Can you attach the file or put up an URL?

Changed in poppler:
assignee: nobody → r0lf
status: Unconfirmed → Needs Info
Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

We need more info to fix this. Feel free to reopen the report with more information.

Changed in poppler:
status: Needs Info → Rejected
Revision history for this message
Jan (jan23) wrote :

Please reopen the bug. It happens to me since I upgraded to Feisty yesterday. Attached you will find the required files.

Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

Lutz, thank you for the update.

The file looks OK to me in both acroread and evince. But I am still on edgy and I might miss what you are trying to point out. Can you also attach a screenshot of how this looks for you?

Changed in poppler:
status: Rejected → Needs Info
Revision history for this message
Jan (jan23) wrote : Re: Font rendering in some pdf files is broken in evince

The problem is the same as to be seen in the screenshot above. But I attach my own screenshot.

Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

The screenshot is not from the pdf file you attached. As I said, the attached file renders fine for me in both Acroread and evince. Please attach the screenshot from test.pdf which is what I was asking for.

I think it is clear that both Lutz and Krzysztof are talking about some kind of "thinning out"-effect on the rendered fonts.

Revision history for this message
Jan (jan23) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Jan (jan23) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

I will set this to confirmed although I cannot reproduce it. I am also out of ideas on how to troubleshoot further or gather more relevant info so I will let the experts take over.

Last thing I did was take a look at the fonts that the attached test.pdf needs which was quite unspectacular. Here is the output from pdffonts.

name type emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ------------ --- --- --- ---------
[none] Type 3 yes no no 11 0

Changed in poppler:
assignee: r0lf → nobody
importance: Undecided → Low
status: Needs Info → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf) wrote :

Oh, Lutz is on feisty and I am on edgy in case that is relevant. I do not know what release Krzysztof was using or whether that makes any difference.

Revision history for this message
Jan (jan23) wrote :

I just want to make clear that I did not have such problem with Edgy but with Feisty only.

Revision history for this message
Hernádi Zoltán (dyingsun) wrote :

I did not have such a problem using Dapper Drake. I installed Feisty Fawn to a brand new HDD, and now I also experience that Evince shows LaTeX-made PDF documents ugly, just like the test.pdf above. I don't have Acrobat, but using KPDF there is no problem with the fonts of LaTeX-made PDFs (neither test.pdf above). I think that Evince in Feisty cannot find some fonts to render the documents well.

Revision history for this message
steven (yc-hecyy) wrote :

Same situation here where there was no problem with Dapper Drake, but with feisty the latex generated pdf had ugly fonts when rendered by evince. It was rendered fine with Adobe reader. Also installing msttcorefont does not alleviate the symptom.

Revision history for this message
Peter Berry (pwberry) wrote :

Seems to be the same as bug 92296.

Revision history for this message
Hernádi Zoltán (dyingsun) wrote :

After upgrading to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (stable), I don't experience this font rendering issue any more.

Revision history for this message
Tobias Wolf (towolf) wrote :

The issue with Lutzens PDF was that he used the standard Type3 Metafont LaTeX fonts. They are only displayed as bitmaps and are always suboptimal for the screen. A proper PostScript Type font should be used (via lmodern or cm-super).

Revision history for this message
Helge Willum Thingvad (helgesdk) wrote :

I'm running Hardy beta, and experiencing the ugly font rendering in Evince.
The same document looks fine in xPDF, but for some reason Evince wont display the smooth fonts.
I have following font packages installed:
 xfonts-base xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable ttf-freefont msttcorefonts language-support-fonts-ja

Viewing at 100% zoom in Evince strains the eyes a lot. I have to zoom to 120% and it is still considerably choppy.
Rendering in xPDF at 100% zoom is flawless, even though in size it is similar to ~80% zoom in Evince (here it is completely unreadable).

Revision history for this message
Helge Willum Thingvad (helgesdk) wrote :

I forgot to tell that the PDF I'm having problems with uses common MS fonts (included in msttcorefonts), non-embedded, type 1.

Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

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.

Changed in poppler:
status: Confirmed → Invalid
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