[cups] Fwd: Missing letters into printed pdf docs

[Brian Potkin]

I assume Philippe did not intend this mail to be for me only, so I'm
sending it to the list. My reply is at the end.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Philippe Lefèvre <ph.l at libertysurf.fr>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2018 at 14:48
Subject: Re: [cups] Missing letters into printed pdf docs
To: Brian Potkin <claremont102 at gmail.com>


Le 05/09/2018 à 15:11, Brian Potkin a écrit :
> On Wed, 5 Sep 2018 at 13:18, Philippe Lefèvre <ph.l at libertysurf.fr> wrote:
>> Thank you very much for your replay Brian.
>>
>> This issue comes only with certain PDFs, always the same. (Those which
>> are sent by my Bank).
> I've seen this sort of thing before, where it is only PDFs from a certain
> source that cause a problem. My dim recollection is that embedded
> fonts are at the root of it. (pdffonts will tell you what is in the PDF).
Here is the result of pdffonts :
name                                 type              encoding
emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ----------------
--- --- --- ---------
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes      9  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     46  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     50  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     54  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     58  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     63  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     67  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     71  0
AAAAAB+CenturyGothic                 TrueType          WinAnsi
yes yes no      14  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     18  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     22  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     26  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     30  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     34  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     38  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     42  0
[none]                               Type 3            Custom
yes no  yes     96  0

>> I never noticed this trouble with other PDFs, reason why I first thought
>> it is an Evince issue.
>>
>> The command line  lp -d <print_queue> <PDF> you suggest works well. All
>> letters are present.
> This gives you a workaround that probably fulfills your primary purpose.
You are absolutely right.  It is already a real good point for me and
I'm happy with that.
But just curious, if you don't mind, I would like to go deeper and try
to better understand how are the things underneath
>> So it seems to suggest that this it is not a CUPS trouble.
> It does, but have a go at this. Display a file with Evince and then print it
> to file (a PDF). This is the Cairo file which Evince would send to CUPS.
> Print this file with lp -d.....   as before.
Well, I did print to a PDF file then sent to the print er via lpd gave
the same thing. All i and l lowcase letters disapeared.
So does it means that the Cairo file is not properly built by Evince?
(Sorry, I don't know what is a Cairo file ... I'm going googling a bit ;) )
>> Do you think I should have a look with Evince/Cairo (I don't know well
>> these pieces of software but I'm going to crawl deeper in that way if
>> needed)
> I do not use Evince myself but I suppose you could report a bug. Even
> if there is one and it is fixed. it would not be applied in jessie because
> it is not a security fix. OTOH you could upgrade to stretch and see what
> happens.
>
> BTW; what printer model are you using?
>
Ok, I will.  My printer is a Canon MX340, but I believe I had the same
thing with my old HP620 deskjet

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Basically, libcairo2  is used by GTK apps (such as Evince and firefox) to
produce a PDF. For more detail on your issue Alex Korobkin has a link in
 his mail. That will take you to

  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94615

and on to a link to a duplicate bug.

stretch doesn't have the fix, so no point in upgrading to it just for this.

-- 
Brian.