Printing from evince resulted in a badly kerned serif font instead of a sans font being used
Submitted by Vivek Dasmohapatra
Link to original bug (#766283)
Description
Created attachment 327649 Correct and mangled printer output, side by side.
Let me open by saying I'm not sure if this is a bug in:
evince libpoppler the HP Laserjet in our office
but I have to start by reporting the bug somewhere, so here it is:
The background: One of our staff submitted an document (a PDF) This document:
• printed correctly with lpr from the command line on my machine • printed correctly with lpr on the reporting user's machine • printed correctly from evince on my laptop ◦ running Debian/jessie, evince 3.14.1, libpoppler 0.26.5 • printed incorrectly from evince on the user's machine ◦ same distribution and versions as my laptop
The printing error [image attached] was that instead of a sans serif font being used, a serif'd one was, and its kerning was badly mangled.
After some digging I discovered the following:
• The PDF specified Helvetica and Helvetica Bold (core fonts) but did not embed them (as is normal for core fonts) • Evince recognised that these were in the core 14 font set and displayed the document with a substituted font instead • On the user's laptop Nimbus Sans was used • On mine TeX Gyre Heros was used • When printing from evince the substituted font was (I think) partially embedded. Certainly when saving a copy of the PDF this happened - on the users laptop tihs resulted in a PDF with Nimbus Sans partially embedded. • The printer ignored or rejected the embedded Nimbus Sans font and substituted a serif'd font with bad kerning instead • When TeX Gyre Heros was embedded, the printer coped fine
So I guess the questions are:
• Is it correct to replace core fonts when sending a document for printing or when saving a copy? I would lean towards not, since everything is supposed to have those fonts (or cope if not), and the printer did in fact cope when no substitute fonts were embedded.
• Are the fonts being embedded badly in some way? I'm not sure if I can release the actual documents in question (I'll check and attach them here if there's nothing confidential in them).
• Whose fault is it that the printer choked on the partially embedded Nimbus font? evince? libpoppler? the printer?
Attachment 327649, "Correct and mangled printer output, side by side.":
Version: 3.14.x