GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 776924
poor type 1c font rendering
Last modified: 2017-04-28 14:11:03 UTC
The following pdf document is being rendered rather ugly in evince: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf All fonts are embedded. They're all type 1c fonts. $ pdffonts pnp.pdf name type encoding emb sub uni object ID ------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- --------- VXEZKP+CMSS17 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 4 0 YDPTNV+CMR12 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 5 0 JLCEZQ+CMR17 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 6 0 NUVJJI+CMSY8 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 7 0 VBIHCP+CMBX10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 8 0 CXZLTS+CMR10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 9 0 JGIYMZ+CMSS10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 10 0 AGGZPP+CMR7 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 11 0 RGQKMS+CMSY10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 12 0 BYIFKE+CMBX12 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 13 0 FNGYIT+CMR8 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 15 0 JFBFYB+CMSY6 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 32 0 OBXTKK+CMR9 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 33 0 GVHKBA+CMTI10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 87 0 RVPORJ+CMMI10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 89 0 JKFOWN+CMSS12 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 93 0 KIISBX+CMR6 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 99 0 WWJJES+CMMI9 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 100 0 DRXVBH+CMSS9 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 101 0 IWKPFB+CMMI8 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 106 0 IYGFKD+CMMI6 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 110 0 SGXEVV+CMTI9 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 129 0 DNNGNS+CMEX9 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 131 0 FPKZIJ+CMSY9 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 132 0 DOOAXC+CMSS8 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 170 0 OLTLXQ+CMCSC10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 179 0 JXRWPD+CMEX10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 188 0 KSYIAZ+CMEX7 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 224 0 UROALT+CMMI5 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 228 0 SKNWGA+MSBM10 Type 1C Builtin yes yes yes 239 0 PFOPPM+CMSY5 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 310 0 EFHBMR+CMR5 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 311 0 PLAHEP+CMEX8 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 690 0 UEHLMU+MSBM7 Type 1C Builtin yes yes no 852 0 I wonder how the embedded pdf viewer of firefox can do a better job with this document than evince. Most other pdf documents look better in evince.
(In reply to Thorsten Hirsch from comment #0) > The following pdf document is being rendered rather ugly in evince: Ugly in what way? The document looks fine to me. A screenshot would help. Could you try it after installing the latest poppler? Or see if hitting Ctrl-R a few times to reload the document, or setting the environment variable G_SLICE=always-malloc before running evince helps? It might be a bug that was recently fixed in poppler.
Created attachment 343004 [details] evince 100%
Created attachment 343005 [details] evince 134%
Created attachment 343006 [details] evince 150%
Created attachment 343007 [details] firefox 100%
Created attachment 343008 [details] firefox 140%
Created attachment 343009 [details] firefox 150%
Created attachment 343010 [details] macos 100%
Created attachment 343011 [details] macos 150%
So here are a couple of screenshots. As you can see evince has the lowest font rendering quality, because it's blurry and the stroke width is not concise (especially when it comes to the equal sign in the headline). The font rendering of the internal pdf viewer of firefox also suffers from being blurry, but at least the stroke width is more concise. I also added some screenshots taken under macOS. They are not blurry, but the resolution is also much higher. So it's more like a reference. Comparing evince's font rendering in the pdf with the font rendering in the outline window on the left, you can see that it is very well possible to get a better result with the lower linux resolution. And it's not like I was searching for a zoom factor where evince has problems. Sure, the quality might improve with other zoom factors, but it also declines with others as well. In the end the zoom factor cannot "fix" the font rendering quality; the font rendering is still clearly better in firefox when "optimizing" the zoom factor in both applications.
Concerning poppler - I guess I already use the version that has been released last month: $ pacman -Q | grep poppler poppler 0.50.0-1 poppler-glib 0.50.0-1
I do see better MacOS preview, but I cannot see major differences between Poppler master and Firefox. I used pdftocairo and pdftoppm from poppler master (~0.54.0). Anyhow, there is nothing that Evince can do on that matter, so I reported the issue in Poppler's bugzilla. Please, follow up the discussion there and thank you for reporting the issue. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100869