Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

listerthrawn · 2010-06-08 20:47:02

Hi,

I'll warn you now, I'm new to arch so please be gentle with me!

I've recently installed Arch and I'm trying to view a pdf with evince but a lot of it is blank. I've installed adobe's acrobat reader and this renders it fine. I've also used evince on Ubuntu previously that has had no problems with this file.

I can't upload the pdf unfortunately, as it's my credit card statement!

Can anyone provide any advice as to how I can track this issue down? I'm assuming it's to do with fonts and from following some other posts here I've ran pdffonts which returned:-

name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
Helvetica-Bold                       Type 1            no  no  no      10  0
Helvetica-BoldOblique                Type 1            no  no  no      11  0
Helvetica                            Type 1            no  no  no      12  0

I'm just not sure how to move on from here and find out if I have these fonts and if they're configured correctly. Can anyone assist?

anonymous_user · 2010-06-08 21:03:44

Have you tried other PDF viewers like epdfview, xpdf, zathura?

kazuo · 2010-06-08 23:19:19

listerthrawn wrote:

name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
Helvetica-Bold                       Type 1            no  no  no      10  0
Helvetica-BoldOblique                Type 1            no  no  no      11  0
Helvetica                            Type 1            no  no  no      12  0

I'm just not sure how to move on from here and find out if I have these fonts and if they're configured correctly. Can anyone assist?

I thinks that the problem is your pdf use Helvetica, but its not embedded (see to column emb with no). When this happen the pdf viewer need to get the font from somewhere, Helvetica have a lot of copies and some systems set then as "Helvetica"s (acroread probabily have one)

I think that installing a real Helvetica (you can buy from a lot of places, e.g. from Linotype or MyFonts, but as all quality fonts its cost much, Helvetica Neue full family cost 1200 dollars) can solve your problem, our you cold use a compatible Helvetica. You can use "Nimbus Sans L" the metric of this font is compatible with Helvetica, its is available in the ghostscript and its free

So install ghostscript. Now go to the /etc/fonts/conf.d and do a symbolic link for the 30-metric-aliases.conf from the /etc/fonts/conf.avail

ls -s ../conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf .

Do this as root.

I thinks this is gonna solve your problem.

Last edited by kazuo (2010-06-08 23:26:53)

listerthrawn · 2010-06-09 21:15:57

kazuo:-

I already have ghostscript installed and I've checked all the links etc. and they seem to be installed as you say. I can see the Nimbus fonts when I do a fc-list

Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic
Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold
Nimbus Roman No9 L:style=Regular
Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular
Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Condensed
Nimbus Roman No9 L:style=Medium Italic
Nimbus Mono L:style=Bold Oblique
Nimbus Roman No9 L:style=Medium
Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Italic
Nimbus Mono L:style=Regular
Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Condensed Italic
Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Condensed
Nimbus Roman No9 L:style=Regular Italic
Nimbus Mono L:style=Regular Oblique
Nimbus Mono L:style=Bold
Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Condensed Italic

Anonymous:- I installed xpdf (which I believe uses the same rendering engine) and it works perfectly! I wonder why then, evince does not display this correctly.

Any more ideas?

Thanks for your help so far.

Leonid.I · 2010-06-14 17:16:56

In my experience, evine has been way more stable than xpdf/epdfview. Xpdf has some old code, which my gcc always complains againts. In other word, if xpdf works and evince does not, there is something wrong with evince, since they, indeed, are both based on poppler.

To be constructive, which evince are you using: from /extra or evince-gtk from aur? I have the latter, ver. 2.30.1. Also, can you post a link to your .pdf file, so that others can confirm the issue?

anonymous_user · 2010-06-14 17:27:17

Leonid.I wrote:

Also, can you post a link to your .pdf file, so that others can confirm the issue?

listerthrawn said "I can't upload the pdf unfortunately, as it's my credit card statement!"

Leonid.I · 2010-06-15 01:38:31

Missed that, sorry...

Still, there is something wrong with the setup. Because I looked at the file with Helv fonts (in evince, of course), and everything works fine. Here is pdffonts:

-21:30-cur_work$ pdffonts MVV2__232400006fbc.pdf 
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
Helvetica                            Type 1            no  no  no      10  0
Helvetica-Bold                       Type 1            no  no  no      11  0

The file came from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=119750

But my evince is custom compiled.

Last edited by Leonid.I (2010-06-15 01:39:16)

rransom · 2010-06-15 02:13:10

On my system, evince uses 'Liberation Sans' to display https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=119750, and xpdf uses some other font (probably Nimbus Sans). Try installing ttf-liberation.

listerthrawn · 2010-06-16 19:05:26

Hi,

Thanks for all your replies. I've been away so apologies for not responding sooner.

I can't remember how I installed evince, but I'm pretty sure if it's in extra then I will have installed with pacman. The version I'm using is 2.30.1 according to the about in the help menu.

I've taken a look at the pdf in the links from the redhat site. It displays just fine in evince and the adobe client. I've also tried the installation of the liberation fonts, as per the advice, but no joy.

rransom: you state that evince is using a particular font to display the pdf on your setup. How do you know what font evince is trying to use?

Is there some way I can find out what evince is trying to use to display the pdf? This baffles me. It's not just this pdf, it's every one I've ever got from my bank. They've always displayed just fine in Ubuntu going back years.

listerthrawn · 2010-06-16 20:14:41

I've tried running evince from the terminal and seeing if there was any output to stderr or stdout. What I see is this.

Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: Unterminated string
Error: Unknown operator 'VѨ'
Error: Leftover args in content stream
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: Unterminated string
Error: Unknown operator 'VѨ'
Error: Leftover args in content stream
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix
Error: There's a form with more q than Q, trying to fix

I'm not so sure that this is a font issue anymore but maybe a evince issue with it not interpreting the file correctly. What are your thoughts?

rransom · 2010-06-16 21:22:54

listerthrawn wrote:

rransom: you state that evince is using a particular font to display the pdf on your setup. How do you know what font evince is trying to use?

I know what Liberation Serif looks like -- it's fairly distinctive -- and the font Evince uses looks like that. Also, GNOME Specimen uses Liberation Serif when I click on Times in the font name list.

hokasch · 2010-06-16 22:44:19

Poppler is based on xpdf, but they are not the same. Xpdf does not use poppler. You can try with epdfview (uses poppler) to rule out evince.

From this patch:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/p … 04978.html

it seems the errors come from an "incorrect pdf" - maybe the coming poppler update will fix it (currently 0.12 in repos, 0.14 just out). If not, the linked bugs could contain some info.

/OT
since poppler 0.13, copy & paste from multi-column pages finally started working. yeahh... that drove me nuts many times before.

Last edited by hokasch (2010-06-16 22:52:15)

Leonid.I · 2010-06-17 17:46:08

rransom wrote:

listerthrawn wrote:
rransom: you state that evince is using a particular font to display the pdf on your setup. How do you know what font evince is trying to use?
I know what Liberation Serif looks like -- it's fairly distinctive -- and the font Evince uses looks like that. Also, GNOME Specimen uses Liberation Serif when I click on Times in the font name list.

Ha-ha, I was going to ask the same question, but then figured this out:

cat /etc/fonts/conf.avail/29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf | grep Helv

BTW, there is no ttf-liberation on my system...
@listerthrawn: I would agree with hokasch. It's either bad pdf, or the incorrect compilation of evince -- checkout evince-gtk from aur... if you run gnome, it would compile easily without any deps. What does pdfinfo show?

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-08 20:47:02

Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#2 2010-06-08 21:03:44

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#3 2010-06-08 23:19:19

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#4 2010-06-09 21:15:57

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#5 2010-06-14 17:16:56

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#6 2010-06-14 17:27:17

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#7 2010-06-15 01:38:31

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#8 2010-06-15 02:13:10

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#9 2010-06-16 19:05:26

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#10 2010-06-16 20:14:41

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#11 2010-06-16 21:22:54

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#12 2010-06-16 22:44:19

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

#13 2010-06-17 17:46:08

Re: Evince is missing large amounts of text from PDF

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