Evince renders document with poor font quality despite font system-wide settings set to subpixel rendering

Attached screenshots depicting the problem.

Font rendering problem when selecting text with Arial font.

that's a poppler issue, could you attach the document to the report? Thanks.

It's a paper for which I don't have distribution rights:

J Neurosci. 1995 Mar;15(3 Pt 1):1755-67.
Merritt DJ, Whitington PM.
Central projections of sensory neurons in the Drosophila embryo correlate with sensory modality, soma position, and proneural gene function.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7891133?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=4

Confirmed on Lucid 10.04 alpha 2.

Uname: Linux 2.6.32-10-generic i686
Package: libpoppler5 0.12.2-2.1ubuntu3

I have found another example PDF that renders very poorly:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/arvindn/misc/knuth_song_complexity.pdf

In this case, selected text is readable and rendered smoothly and fine.

Selecting text, though, selects also entire paragraphs for the adjacent text column (which prevents from doing effective copy and paste elsewhere).

Still occurring on Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 updated to the latest version of poppler.

Uname: Linux 2.6.32-10-generic i686
Packages:
    evince 2.29.5-0ubuntu1
    poppler 0.12.3-0ubuntu1

The issue described in comment #7 is a different bug, there is another bug somewhere already which deals with evince not supporting columns. Try to find it and comment in it.

By the way, your example document consist of scanned pages.
There is no way to apply subpixel rendering to images.

And the selection effect is caused by the normally invisible OCR layer.

These journals simply scan the old issues and run OCR over them to make their archive searchable.

Tobias: thanks. Would be nice if evince told me so somehow--how am I supposed to know, as a user, that the text is a badly scanned image with an OCR layer on top?

It is probably a good scan, but there’s unfortunately another bug in Poppler that scales grayscale and bitonal images poorly.

It’s upstream at: http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5589

You can look forward to an imminent fix, which will be in the next release.