Bug 195990

Summary: Poor font rendering in okular (PDF, DVI)
Product: [Applications] okular Reporter: Carsten Milkau <chat.noir>
Component: generalAssignee: Okular developers <okular-devel>
Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM    
Severity: normal CC: jordonwii
Priority: NOR    
Version: 0.8.4   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Gentoo Packages   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments: Comparison of the same PDF document viewed in Adobe Reader, KPDF and Okular
Patches applied to poppler 0.10.5 by gentoo
Comparison of the same DVI document viewed in KDVI and Okular
The presented DVI file

Description Carsten Milkau 2009-06-11 11:05:25 UTC
Version:           0.8.4 (using KDE 4.2.4)
Compiler:          gcc (Gentoo 4.3.2-r3 p1.6, pie-10.1.5) 4.3.2 CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -mfpmath=sse -O2 -pipe"
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages

Latex/PDFLatex generated documents are much less readeable in okular, compared to KPDF, even with both using the same version of poppler. I'll provide a screenshot with PDF documents and Adobe Reader for comparison. KPDF's quality is quite close to AR's, yet okular looks poor. Font antialiasing is enabled in both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.2. It looks quite the same with DVI documents. Postscript documents, however, don't exhibit any significant difference in presentation quality.

Okular version: 0.8.4 (KDE 4.2.4)
KPDF version: 0.5.10 (KDE 3.5.10) [optimisation disabled]
poppler version: 0.10.5 +patches (see attachments)
Comment 1 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-11 11:07:33 UTC
Created attachment 34425 [details]
Comparison of the same PDF document viewed in Adobe Reader, KPDF and Okular
Comment 2 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-11 11:30:25 UTC
Created attachment 34428 [details]
Patches applied to poppler 0.10.5 by gentoo

These patches are applied to poppler and poppler-bindings by gentoo. Bindings have been enabled for GTK, QT3 and QT4.

poppler patches:
poppler-0.10.5-xpdf-3.02pl3.patch
poppler-CVE-2009-1188.patch

poppler-bindings patches:
poppler-CVE-2009-1187.patch
Makefile modifications to use preinstalled libpoppler
Comment 3 Pino Toscano 2009-06-11 12:17:52 UTC
(In reply to comment #0)
> Latex/PDFLatex generated documents are much less readeable in okular, compared
> to KPDF, even with both using the same version of poppler.

KPDF does not use poppler. And if it does, your distro is responsible for it, but it isn't what was developed by KDE.

> I'll provide a
> screenshot with PDF documents and Adobe Reader for comparison. KPDF's quality
> is quite close to AR's, yet okular looks poor. Font antialiasing is enabled in
> both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.2.

Okular does not render PDF documents by itself, but Poppler does.
Please report the rendering issues to the Poppler's bug tracking system at https://bugs.freedesktop.org, "poppler" product.
Comment 4 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-11 13:28:23 UTC
Yet, okular must use poppler in a different way than KPDF does, since as noted above, there are serious differences in visual quality between both, although both are using exactly the same version of poppler. I don't know their code, so are you absolutely sure this is not caused by how poppler is used in each of these applications? Do you know other QT PDF viewers to check whether the QT 4 bindings are the problem?
Comment 5 Pino Toscano 2009-06-11 13:32:52 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> Yet, okular must use poppler in a different way than KPDF does,

Repeat with me: "KPDF does not use Poppler".

> since as noted
> above, there are serious differences in visual quality between both, although
> both are using exactly the same version of poppler.

KPDF's xpdf code is comparable to xpdf 3.02, or poppler 0.5 (super-old).

> I don't know their code, so are you absolutely sure this is not caused by
> how poppler is used in each of these applications?

Okular just asks Poppler to render pages as images, that's it.
Comment 6 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-11 13:45:22 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
Sorry, I overlooked part of your comment. KPDF can be compiled with the option --with-poppler, which is the default for my distro.
Comment 7 Albert Astals Cid 2009-06-11 23:06:37 UTC
#6, no, that option does not exist in KPDF, might exist in your distro, but still it's not real KPDF
Comment 8 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-12 12:13:44 UTC
Dangit! It's a kdegraphics option, but apparently not affecting kpdf. Thank you for your help and patience! Let's mark this invalid, then.
Comment 9 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-12 14:36:10 UTC
Created attachment 34467 [details]
Comparison of the same DVI document viewed in KDVI and Okular

Now unfortunately, there is no external library used for rendering DVI documents. As it seems, the code of kdvi/xdvi has been recycled. If that is true, something might have gone wrong ... the same loss in readability and visial quality appears with DVI files as well: thin lines tend to disappear, thick lines tend to dominate. I initially mentioned this, but I did not provide a screenshot for it yet, so here it comes. Where does this problem belong? Please send me on or reopen.
Comment 10 Albert Astals Cid 2009-06-15 23:27:28 UTC
Are you sure the right is a dvi? The fact that title says dvi doesn't mean anything as title is got from the file.
Comment 11 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-16 00:32:34 UTC
Yes I am, it's vanilla Latex output.
Comment 12 Albert Astals Cid 2009-06-16 01:01:55 UTC
Reopening then, please attach the dvi file.
Comment 13 Carsten Milkau 2009-06-16 14:44:20 UTC
Created attachment 34580 [details]
The presented DVI file

This DVI file was generated using texlive 2008.
Comment 14 Christoph Feck 2009-10-21 13:38:26 UTC
I can confirm that using poppler 0.12 this bug is finally fixed. See also http://bjacob.livejournal.com/10641.html
Comment 15 jordonwii 2012-01-05 04:40:28 UTC
Given #14, should this bug remain open? 

Carsten: Can you still reproduce?
Comment 16 Carsten Milkau 2012-01-05 09:57:58 UTC
Not reproducible with my current setup.

Qt: 4.7.2
KDE: 4.6.5 (4.6.5)
Okular: 0.12.5
poppler: 0.16.7

Marking resolved/fixed, if you're ok with that.