After upgrading to poppler-0.22.1, barcodes on tickets become blurry. The same issue happens with .22.2, and does not with .20.5. Printing is done with evince, through CUPS to lprng server which emulates a PostScript printer. I had a similar issue before and (if I recall right) it was because of cups-filters using ghostscript rather than poppler's pdftops. But now it happens on the client rather than the print server, and seems to be caused solely by poppler. After converting the PDF file to PostScript with pdftops and printing that, the barcode is fine. In the 'initial zoom' evince shows the PDF blurred too but after zooming in, the barcode becomes sharp. Interesting thing is that in the 'print preview', even after zooming the barcode is blurry (same as in the print). I have to leave now. If you need more information, please ping me later. If you'd like to get a test document, please ping me privately since the tickets contain some document numbers.
Some new facts: 1) print preview is blurry even with older versions. So the only way I can reproduce this is by printing... 2) i was able to narrow it down to poppler-0.21.3. The NEWS file states: Release 0.21.3 core: * Splash: Implement bilinear image scaling (Bug #22138) * CairoOutputDev: Update fill and stroke color in startPage (Bug #54526) * Fix GooString::insert() * Allow large chars in TextPage * Fix crash on ActualText::end * Don't use memcpy to copy classes * Fix warnings glib: * Check if words end with spaces (Bug #54504) * Ensure text is only computed on first render * Fix warnings while generating introspection file * Fix returns tag in PopplerAttachmentSaveFunc api doc * Minor demo fixes and the bilinear scaler sounds like a good way to mess this up.
Yep, bisected it down to: commit a97aead193a927b91a4e33d7b5d2ba7179e664df Author: Adrian Johnson <ajohnson@redneon.com> Date: Fri Nov 30 21:30:19 2012 +0100 Splash: Implement bilinear image scaling Bug #22138
You can use a Qt4-viewer to check this without printing; poppler-qt4 uses Splash for displaying. Either take the builtin demo <poppler_build_dir>/qt4/demos/poppler_qt4viewer Or take qpdfview. If you don't want to make your PDFs public just create your own: http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~ploetz/latexbarcode.html
Sry... Links in the link don't work. Furthermore it seems to be about rendering images not scalable lines. I played around with inkscape, generated pdf that include bitmap graphics and scalable ones - but can't reproduce your issue (printing with okular using poppler-0.22.2 and 0.20.5) I will try with evince (need to install it first).
(In reply to comment #3) > You can use a Qt4-viewer to check this without printing; poppler-qt4 uses > Splash for displaying. Either take the builtin demo > <poppler_build_dir>/qt4/demos/poppler_qt4viewer > Or take qpdfview. > > If you don't want to make your PDFs public just create your own: > http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~ploetz/latexbarcode.html I'm afraid this is something specific to those files (I have no idea how they're generating them). I've attached an example file in the upstream bug.
Fixed in app-text/poppler-0.22.2-r1
