[upstream] openoffice.org PDF conversion puts lines into background

Does this only happen on diagonal gradients? I can't reproduce it on a vertical gradient.

Thanks for your bug report, using your files I can confirm that this happens, setting status to confirmed.

Do you still have this problem with openoffice.org 1:2.4.1-11ubuntu2 in Ubuntu 8.10?

If so can you attach the original source document that converts incorrectly?

Thanks,

Chris Cheney

I am in a production 8.04 environment and cannot do tests on later versions, but you can take the .ppt I posted and try it yourself.

Also, I had the same problem in the past week at a conference, where we tried converting a file with a gradient to PDF on both Windows OpenOffice and Mac NeoOffice. I do not know what versions they had of those programs but it was a professional conference AV service so I expect they were current.

Thanks,

--jh--

Sorry somehow I overlooked that file I guess. Yes I can reproduce this on openoffice.org 1:2.4.1-11ubuntu2.

Thanks,

Chris

Also seen in upstream openoffice.org 3.0.0.

Same problem experienced in 1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2.1 on 8.04. The problem most definitely exists with vertical gradients too.

Has anybody discovered any workaround *at all* for this problem, bar removing all gradients? I'm in desperate need of a clean document conversion, and can find no way at all to achieve this without altering the design of all my seminar slides.

Moreover, has anybody managed to locate the upstream bug report? I checked on OO's bug database but couldn't find a reference to the problem.

Ah, I just found the link to OO's bug report under the 'Assigned to' heading above.

I've noticed that the white lines DO NOT appear when the PDF is opened using the official Acrobat Reader (on Windows and Linux). They DO appear when it's opened with Evince (GNOME's PDF viewer) and 'Docs' for iPhone.

I'm inferring therefore that possibly OO doesn't use the 'correct'/standard method(s) for exporting gradients, and I'm guessing that both evince and this 'docs' application use the same libraries for reading PDF files, which can't properly cope with whatever OO is doing.

Have others experienced the same effects as above? I will try out some other PDF viewers (probably KDE-based) when I find some time.

It seems the problem really resides in Poppler - the free library used by Evince and many others to read PDFs. Specifically, it appears to be in the Cairo backend of Poppler, as people seem to be reporting other backends render the PDFs correctly.

Links to the main bug reports citing gradient issues (filed under Poppler, which is overseen by FreeDesktop.org):

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10942
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14160
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15501
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16235

KPDF and XPDF suffer from the same problems as Evince - presumably using the same poppler libraries with Cairo. Interestingly, gv entirely failed to load my test PDF documents.

So I don't know if a problem also exists within OO - I haven't done the final test of using some pieces of rubbish such as Microshi* Office/Adobe Acrobat to create some PDFs with gradients and test loading them with the poppler libraries.

@Adrian Busolini

Hello,

I don't know what libs google docs use to convert/display pdf, but the white lines are present on the gradient. Not tried with acrobat reader, but with foxit reader (there's a linux version!) it shows the gradient fine. So I guess it's not a openoffice issue.

Best regards,

Pedro Saraiva

Isn't this a duplicate of bug #164233? It states the same thing and has the same upstream bug watch added, as far as I can see.

Yes, it appears to be the same complaint. It's also over 2 years old, and still doing it (ooo 3.2.0.10 in Ubuntu 10.4). Can this be so hard to fix? There's a whole generation of young scientists being pushed to PowerPoint for conference posters over this one issue.

--jh--

Marking as a duplicate of bug #164233 then.