Gentoo Websites Logo
Go to: Gentoo Home Documentation Forums Lists Bugs Planet Store Wiki Get Gentoo!
Bug 257684 - app-text/xpdf distorts sometimes squishes text
Summary: app-text/xpdf distorts sometimes squishes text
Status: RESOLVED TEST-REQUEST
Alias: None
Product: Gentoo Linux
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Current packages (show other bugs)
Hardware: All Linux
: High normal (vote)
Assignee: Printing Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-02-04 22:45 UTC by David
Modified: 2010-02-16 21:35 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---


Attachments
This pdf file exhibits the problem (xpdfbug.pdf,9.23 KB, application/pdf)
2009-02-04 22:47 UTC, David
Details
This png shows what my screen looks like when xpdf exhibits the bug (xpdfbug.png,16.67 KB, image/png)
2009-02-04 22:48 UTC, David
Details

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description David 2009-02-04 22:45:58 UTC
For some PDF files, xpdf will squish certain lines of text.  This only seems to happen with files with certain content that I create with certain versions of ps2pdf, but once I have generated such a file, xpdf reliably displays it incorrectly.  Hitting reload 'r' on any page fixes the problem, but then when I page pack and forth with 'n' and 'p', the problem re-appears.

For comparison, I downloaded and compiled xpdf-3.02pl2 directly from the upstream source, and the problem went away, suggesting it is something with gentoo's ebuild of xpdf.  However, other gentoo ebuilds, such as evince, seem to display the PDF files fine.

I have run emerge -NDu world and revdep-rebuild, so believe I am running the latest version of everything in the amd64 port.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. View xpdfbug.pdf with xpdf
2. Page to the next slide by pressing 'n' or PgDown
3. The font should be squished in the first line

Actual Results:  
I will attach an image showing the results
Comment 1 David 2009-02-04 22:47:31 UTC
Created attachment 180980 [details]
This pdf file exhibits the problem
Comment 2 David 2009-02-04 22:48:09 UTC
Created attachment 180982 [details]
This png shows what my screen looks like when xpdf exhibits the bug
Comment 3 Peter Alfredsen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2009-02-04 23:30:41 UTC
xpdf is old and not really supported anymore. If it's a bug in xpdf it's unlikely to be resolved unless you can provide a patch.
Perhaps this is a problem in the pdf rendering library poppler.
What is the output of:
emerge -pv poppler poppler-bindings
Can you reproduce this problem with epdfview, evince or okular?
(To name a few)
Comment 4 David 2009-02-04 23:47:03 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> xpdf is old and not really supported anymore. If it's a bug in xpdf it's
> unlikely to be resolved unless you can provide a patch.
> Perhaps this is a problem in the pdf rendering library poppler.
> What is the output of:
> emerge -pv poppler poppler-bindings
> Can you reproduce this problem with epdfview, evince or okular?
> (To name a few)

Sorry, just to be clear, this is not a bug in xpdf, because if I download xpdf from foolabs and compile it, it works just fine.  This is a bug in the way that gentoo customizes xpdf (possibly to work with an external libpoppler, instead of the one that ships with xpdf?? though I don't see where the ebuild does this, it seems to).  I could suggest a patch which is just a new ebuild that simply compiles and installs xpdf out of the box, but there is probably some rationale behind gentoo's ebuild that I would be undermining.

To answer your question, I get:

# emerge -pv poppler poppler-bindings

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R   ] app-text/poppler-0.8.7  USE="jpeg zlib -cjk" 0 kB
[ebuild   R   ] app-text/poppler-bindings-0.8.7  USE="cairo gtk -qt3 -qt4 -test" 0 kB

Also, I've tried evince and acroread, which don't exhibit the bug, but they are much slower.  Evince also has a number of bugs in the way it interacts with my window manager (for presentations) and in how it handles reloading files.  I'll try the other tools you suggest.  I know xpdf is old, but it's still pretty hard to beat in terms of performance and functionality (e.g., being able to start really quickly, and being able to control multiple open xpdfs remotely from makefiles and such when rebuilding files).
Comment 5 David 2009-02-04 23:59:55 UTC
I also just tried epdfview, which is closer to what I want, but slower and doesn't seem to antialias fonts on my system, because large fonts look very bad compared to xpdf and evince.  okular is still masked ~amd64, so I couldn't try it.

I hope Gentoo doesn't let the xpdf ebuild die just yet.  Or maybe add a nopoppler option to the ebuild so people like me who have these pdf files can get a self-contained version of xpdf that works.  My working xpdf binary that I compiled myself is 4M, compared to 280KB for the one from the ebuild, so I understand if some people don't want duplicate poppler functionality, but it would be nice to have the option.
Comment 6 Peter Alfredsen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2009-02-05 00:28:04 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> I hope Gentoo doesn't let the xpdf ebuild die just yet.  Or maybe add a
> nopoppler option to the ebuild so people like me who have these pdf files can
> get a self-contained version of xpdf that works.

I think you may be better off making an ebuild with Debian's xpdf patches and maintaining it for yourself, if that's the thing you want. Anyway, not a bug in poppler, I'm leaving it to printing herd.
Comment 7 Samuli Suominen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2010-02-16 21:35:52 UTC
What's the status of this with poppler-0.12.3-r5 and xpdf-3.02-r4 ? Reopen if it's still an issue