Hi,
sorry for the late reply.
On 2014-04-12 21:32, Michael Forbes wrote:
Package: libpoppler37
Version: 0.22.5-4+b1
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
Dear Maintainer,
Many pdf's of papers from arXiv.org have words that fail to render
completely on screen (using pdf-readers that use poppler as a
backend).
I have experienced this for several months (perhaps longer) and this
has
happened on at least 30 papers (probably more). I have not have this
happen on papers from other sources.
As the arXiv uses its own custom LaTeX-to-PDF software, one could
imagine that it could be the origin of these problems. However,
other
pdf-readers such as Iceweasel's internal reader, or gv, render these
pdf's correctly. Thus, I can only assume that there is something
incorrect about libpoppler.
I will give an example of the error below. It is not a minimal
example,
as I do not know enough of PDF syntax to prune it to such an example.
Further, posting a paper on the arXiv soley to understand this bug
seems
unwise.
---
For example, consider the pdf from the paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.2819
where the pdf is:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.2819v1
Reading the pdf in okular/evince/xpdf I experience that the first
sentence of the introduction reads:
The class of linear quasi-cyclic codes over nite elds ...
Reading the pdf in the Iceweasel-previewer/ghostscript, one sees that
the sentence should read:
The class of linear quasi-cyclic codes over finite fields ...
This error also occurs with "finite fields" in the second sentence of
the abstract, as well as the first sentence of section II. A similar
error occurs with "Define" just before equation (17) on page 3.
Note that okular displays the sentence correctly, when reading the
postscript
version of the paper (that is,
http://arxiv.org/ps/1404.2819v1
), but I believe that it is then using ghostscript as a backend.
Further, if one uses
pdftocairo -jpeg 1404.2819v1.pdf
on the above pdf, then the sentence is also rendered poorly. As all
four of the above methods (okular/evince/xpdf/pdftocairo) use
libpoppler
to render pdfs, I can only conclude that there is some error in
libpoppler.
Note, however, that the above sentence is not being completely
mangled.
That is, in okular at least, the above sentence "exists", in that if
you
use the text-selection tool on "__nite __eld" then "finite field" is
actually put in the clipboard. This suggests there is some error in
getting these characters to the screen, as opposed to a mangling of
the
parsing of the underlying pdf.
This is a duplicate of bug #740801 -- I will merge to it soon, so
followup there in case.
Thanks for your report,
--
Pino Toscano
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