XeTeX ⇒ Fontspec documentation problem in certain PDF viewers

[frabjous]

Has anyone else noticed that the Fontspec documentation doesn't display properly in certain PDF viewers?

I use linux (Ubuntu 9.04), and have three PDF viewers installed: Acrobat Reader 9, Evince ("Document Viewer") 2.26.1, and Okular 0.8.2.

The fontspec documentation (for version 1.18) shows up fine in Acrobat Reader. Here's a snippet from page 4.

acroread.png (73.67 KiB) Viewed 8500 times

However, it does not display properly in either evince or okular. Here's what the same page (from precisely the same file) looks like in evince:

evince.png (56.95 KiB) Viewed 8500 times

You'll notice that many words are missing. (Mainly stuff that was in a monospace font in the original.)

For the most part, this is a minor inconvenience. Evince is the default PDF reader on my system, and it's what is called by texdoc, so I have to call acroread directly if I want to view this file. No big deal.

But what I'm more worried about is what this says about PDFs created by Xe(La)TeX generally--are they only correctly viewable using Acrobat or Acrobat Reader? And is this a reason to steer clear of Xe(La)Tex?

Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

[gmedina]

Hi,

Ubuntu 8.04LTS and Debian Lenny with Evince, KPDF and Acrobat Reader... no problems here.

[meho_r]

I can confirm what frabjous said, same here, Ubuntu 9.04, 64bit, with evince and okular those lines aren't displayed, while Adobe Reader is OK. I noticed that some Asian characters aren't displayed as well, although the subset of the font is embedded, as shown in Adobe Reader Properties, but not shown in Evince, neither in Properties, nor in text.

[phi]

I guess this is a bug in libpoppler or a related component, not in XeTeX. Please file a bug report at the appropriate location (probably Launchpad).

[frabjous]

OK, thanks for your help.

I've filed a report with poppler-bugs <poppler-bugs@lists.freedesktop.org> -- I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

[frabjous]

Follow-up: Installing the poppler-data package, i.e.:

sudo apt-get install poppler-data

Resolved the problem. This should really come pre-installed on Ubuntu with evince/okular, etc., but I guess it isn't.

[meho_r]

Thanks for the info. I installed it and try after phi mentioned possible libpoppler issue, no avail. But after logout it worked.

[nzroller]

I can confirm both problem and solution, but I wonder what poppler-data has that is needed and why this particular PDF requires it?

[frabjous]

Well, the archives of poppler-bugs list say that the package is needed because of support for Adobe-Japan1 mapping in PDFs; why that's required here, I couldn't say.