Strange font rendering (eg: letter "f" and "italics")

Walton · 2018-07-27 20:02:24

At first I thought this was a printing issue, but I've attempted to copy and paste some characters from a PDF and found that I get the same errors. I do not seem to have these errors while reading text within my browser, but when I try to print them or paste them I get issues.

An example would be that if I was reading this paper none of the f's format when printing.
On the third page of the paper in my browser I see

But it pastes the greek phi and theta (which are spelled out but italic) as Chinese characters, which hopefully produces below. (I am copy and pasting the highlighted section)

"This allows us to target Cinema [3], by providing camera parameters 푝ℎ푖 and 푡ℎ푒푡푎, that produce a total of 푝ℎ푖 * 푡ℎ푒푡푎 images."

In case this is not reproducing this is what I see on my screen:

Because it is producing with a paste I believe that this is a font issue and not a cups issue. Though I cannot reproduce the problems with the letter "f" by pasting, so there might be a combination.

What fonts do I need on Arch for this basic type of functionality? I never remember having a problem like this in the past, but that may have been just happenstance and accidentally installing the correct fonts.

loqs · 2018-07-27 20:10:30

I can reproduce the issue using pdfjs but it copies correctly in evince.

Walton · 2018-07-27 20:19:32

Continuing with that I cannot reproduce with Okular. Even printing works! It also seems to print in higher quality. I did forget to note that the browser I am using is Firefox 61, and its PDF reader. So maybe it is a JS issue? Or a FF one?

Also I do not get the "f" error with any of the f's on the title and disclaimer page of the linked document. Only in the actual paper section.

loqs · 2018-07-27 20:25:03

Firefox uses pdfjs for its pdf viewer. Seems to be an issue with that viewer.

seth · 2018-07-28 07:22:50

printf '?' | od -x
0000000 9df0 9d91

So some knucklehead abused 4-byte utf-8 sequences (the f0 is the leading byte and indicator) which *looked* like italic latin in the font de jours and pdfjs gets confused about the byte order, since
u9df0: 鷰
u9d91: 鶑
…

Arch Linux

#1 2018-07-27 20:02:24

Strange font rendering (eg: letter "f" and "italics")

#2 2018-07-27 20:10:30

Re: Strange font rendering (eg: letter "f" and "italics")

#3 2018-07-27 20:19:32

Re: Strange font rendering (eg: letter "f" and "italics")

#4 2018-07-27 20:25:03

Re: Strange font rendering (eg: letter "f" and "italics")

#5 2018-07-28 07:22:50

Re: Strange font rendering (eg: letter "f" and "italics")

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