Ubuntu
poppler package

Evince ignores font hinting settings

Bug #87230 reported by Alexander Jones on 2007-02-23

This bug affects 3 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Poppler	Unknown	Medium	freedesktop-bugs #10218
	poppler (Ubuntu)	Triaged	Wishlist	Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: evince

I specifically set my system to disable font hinting because I prefer the appearance.

However, Evince still insists on using hinting when rendering. As a result, I get particularly bad (worse than normal) text rendering with all documents. See attached screenshot for example.

Zooming in and out causes apparent font weight to increase and decrease by massive amounts. Worse still is that italicized text at the same zoom level appears thinner for Times New Roman. See screenshot for example. Notice also under point 4 the italic "zero" has its diagonal bar in the "z" missing. This is just another issue with font hinting, but illustrates the problem well.

Tags:

Revision history for this message

Alexander Jones (alex-weej) wrote on 2007-02-23:

Screenshot Edit (129.8 KiB, image/png)

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In freedesktop.org Bugzilla #10218, Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2007-03-07:

That bug has been opened on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/87230

"Binary package hint: evince

I specifically set my system to disable font hinting because I prefer the appearance.

However, Evince still insists on using hinting when rendering. As a result, I get particularly bad (worse than normal) text rendering with all documents. See attached screenshot for example.

Revision history for this message

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2007-03-07:

Thanks for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10218

Changed in evince:
importance:	Undecided → Wishlist
status:	Unconfirmed → Confirmed

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2007-03-08

Changed in poppler:
status:	Unknown → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

In freedesktop.org Bugzilla #10218, Marciano Siniscalchi (msiniscalchi) wrote on 2007-03-20:

I believe this is the same bug as #9862: Poppler (and xpdf before it) uses a hard-coded, compile-time check to determine whether or not to use hinting, and is this insensitive to runtime settings.

I originally reported #9862 on Launchpad, and the kind of rendering in the above attachment looks sadly familiar... :-(

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In freedesktop.org Bugzilla #10218, Alexander Jones (alex-weej) wrote on 2007-06-15:

Is this fixed?

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Alexander Jones (alex-weej) wrote on 2007-06-15:

I think this is fixed. Awaiting upstream confirmation.

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Alexander Jones (alex-weej) wrote on 2007-09-06:

FWIW, I am absolutely convinced that Evince should never be using hinting, and not even be using metrics hinting in PDFs, due to the layout being defined in the PDF.

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) on 2008-02-06

Changed in poppler:
status:	Confirmed → Triaged

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2010-09-10

Changed in poppler:
importance:	Unknown → Medium

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2011-01-24

Changed in poppler:
importance:	Medium → Unknown

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2011-02-03

Changed in poppler:
importance:	Unknown → Medium

Revision history for this message

penguin (myfreemail) wrote on 2012-11-18:

This bug still exists on Ubuntu 12.04

Evince Version: 3.4.0
cairo: 0.18.4

Revision history for this message

In freedesktop.org Bugzilla #10218, Gitlab-migration (gitlab-migration) wrote on 2018-08-21:

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/288.