Arch Linux

sherrellbc

Member

Registered: 2014-05-26

Posts: 112

Font are not properly displayed when viewing PDF

The problem is very obviously font related. I do not want to go blindly installing different font packages in hopes of finding one that solves this problem. Sometimes the issue only manifests itself when viewing from a browser, while other times using a document view, such as evince, also exhibits the same behavior similarly. What I see is something like this:

From my research I found that when a character is not able to be properly represented then it will be replaced.

Below are all the font-related packages installed on my machine.

$ pacman -Q | grep font

fontconfig 2.11.95-1
fontsproto 2.1.3-1
gsfonts 20150811-1
lib32-fontconfig 2.11.95-1
libfontenc 1.1.3-1
libxfont 1.5.1-1
noto-fonts 20151224-2
xorg-font-util 1.3.1-1
xorg-font-utils 7.6-4
xorg-fonts-100dpi 1.0.3-2
xorg-fonts-75dpi 1.0.3-2
xorg-fonts-alias 1.0.3-1
xorg-fonts-encodings 1.0.4-4
xorg-fonts-misc 1.0.3-4
xorg-mkfontdir 1.0.7-2
xorg-mkfontscale 1.1.2-1

Is there a system "default" font that is used or is it application specific? I could not find much in Chromium other than "Standard font", "Serif font", and "Sans-serif font" were "Terminal", "Bookman URW" and "Bookman URW", respectively. Is it that my system just does not have the font package that the PDF was encoded using?

I tired installing one font package, but it changed my terminal font. Is there a way for controlling which fonts are being used? How can I determine which font set is missing for a given document?

Last edited by sherrellbc (2016-07-22 03:07:42)

berbae

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 1,302

Re: Font are not properly displayed when viewing PDF

Rather post the output of 'pacman -Qsq font'.
Here is my output:

$ pacman -Qsq font
cantarell-fonts
fontconfig
fontsproto
freetype2
libfontenc
libxfont
libxft
noto-fonts
ttf-dejavu
ttf-ms-win10
ttf-oxygen
xorg-bdftopcf
xorg-font-util
xorg-font-utils
xorg-fonts-100dpi
xorg-fonts-75dpi
xorg-fonts-alias
xorg-fonts-encodings
xorg-fonts-misc
xorg-mkfontdir
xorg-mkfontscale

FlowIt

Member

Registered: 2014-10-25

Posts: 239

Re: Font are not properly displayed when viewing PDF

So just to clarify: You only have display issues in pdf documents? So let's say you have an odt and a pdf version of one document, the odt one gets displayed correctly. Are the missing characters always the same or does this change? And - what characters are those?
Right now I can only suggest you try another ttf font, maybe dejavu. I am using this one and never had any problems. This way we can find out if the problem is related to your font selection or not.

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: Font are not properly displayed when viewing PDF

You should provide a test pdf so that other people can try to reproduce the problem.

---

R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

sherrellbc

Member

Registered: 2014-05-26

Posts: 112

Re: Font are not properly displayed when viewing PDF

The results of the query command are as follows:

$ pacman -Qsq font
fontconfig
fontsproto
freetype2
gsfonts
lib32-fontconfig
lib32-freetype2
libfontenc
libxfont
libxft
noto-fonts
t1lib
xorg-bdftopcf
xorg-font-util
xorg-font-utils
xorg-fonts-100dpi
xorg-fonts-75dpi
xorg-fonts-alias
xorg-fonts-encodings
xorg-fonts-misc
xorg-mkfontdir
xorg-mkfontscale

So just to clarify: You only have display issues in pdf documents?

It really varies. For example, this PDF (its an instruction manual for a ceiling fan) works great with evince, while its rendering inside Chromium looks like the image shown in the original post. Other times evince fails to properly render the PDF showing similar output (rectangles replacing unknown characters).

Right now I can only suggest you try another ttf font, maybe dejavu ...

I installed this font package and it seemed to do the trick. Actually, installing it really changed the look and feel of my system fonts The type and size of the font stayed the same but the look appeared different (bolder, larger, etc). How are system fonts selected? Why did the ttf-dejavu font package take precedence over all other installed?

Last edited by sherrellbc (2016-07-23 11:44:16)