Evince fails on PDF file generated by MS Word that are used by US gov websites
The following file fails to display with evince, as included in Ubuntu 18.04: ii evince 3.28.4-0ubuntu amd64 Document (PostScript, PDF) viewer
It can be downloaded from here, the US Congress website, but I've also attached it here: (should the PDF change in the meantime) R46242.pdf
Evince complains that the PDF contains no pages (well, my locale is set to German, but that's what the message means):
Ghostscript OTOH, has no such qualms:
(uber) andreas@obelix:~/private/twitter_profile$ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -r200 -sOutputFile=test.pdf ~/Downloads/R46242.pdf </dev/null GPL Ghostscript 9.26 (2018-11-20) Copyright (C) 2018 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details. Processing pages 1 through 58. Page 1 Querying operating system for font files... Substituting font Times-Roman for TimesNewRomanPSMT.
Ok, I think I've got the explanation here:
**** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored. **** The file was produced by: **** >>>> Microsoft� Word 2016; modified using iText� 7.1.2 �2000-2018 iText Group NV (AGPL-version) <<<< **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF **** specification.
**** The rendered output from this file may be incorrect.
I can see if that is not fixed, seeing as Microsoft Word 2016 seems to be outputting invalid PDFs, but that is quite an irritation on a Gnome desktop: You cannot read some PDFs that serious people use in the wild.