[cups] Fwd: Missing letters into printed pdf docs [Resolved]

[Philippe Lefèvre]

OOPS !
Yes Brian, of course my reply was also for the list. Sorry and thanks
for the forward.

I also saw that both debian Jessie and Stretch uses libcairo_gobject2
1.14. (There is a Stretch backport with the lib 1.15)
I'm afraid it should be tricky to do this without breaking dependencies,
so the solution using lpd is perfect for the time being.

Many thanks again Brian and Alex for your kind help.
Kind regards,
Philippe


Le 05/09/2018 à 17:44, Brian Potkin a écrit :
> 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.
>