Bug 433979

Summary:	American tax forms checkbox state cannot been seen when form is hidden
Product:	[Applications] okular	Reporter:	Leonard Lausen <leonard>
Component:	PDF backend	Assignee:	Okular developers <okular-devel>
Status:	RESOLVED UPSTREAM
Severity:	normal	CC:	aacid, leonard, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version:	20.12.2
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Show forms mode Standard mode

Description Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 03:51:15 UTC

SUMMARY
IRS Tax forms such as https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf contain various checkboxes. In "Show Form" mode, these checkboxes are editable, but they do no longer show up in the printout or no-"Show Form" mode. This is unlike Gnome's Evince, which is also poppler based but does show the ticked checkboxes in printout.

As this works in Evince, suspect to be a Okular specific rendering problem?

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. wget https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf
2. okular f1040.pdf
3. Click "Show Forms"
4. Check a box
5. Print the form or click "Show Forms" again

OBSERVED RESULT
Ticked checkbox is no longer displayed.

EXPECTED RESULT
Ticked checkbox is visible.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Linux/KDE Plasma: 
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.21.2
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.79
Qt Version: 5.15.2

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
This appears unrelated to the XFA content. The same problem applies to f1040-noxfa.pdf file obtained via "pdftk f1040.pdf output f1040-noxfa.pdf drop_xfa"

Comment 1 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 03:52:47 UTC

I'm using Okular compiled with latest poppler 21.03.0.

Comment 2 Albert Astals Cid 2021-03-05 16:11:22 UTC

Works fine for me https://i.imgur.com/1h9QHx9.gif

Comment 3 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 16:51:20 UTC

Thank you Albert. That's very interesting. Can you share more details on your system configuration (Okular version, poppler version)? I attached two screenshots to show that the boxes do not show up correctly in my environment.

Comment 4 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 16:52:15 UTC

Created attachment 136403 [details]
Show forms mode

Comment 5 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 16:52:31 UTC

Created attachment 136404 [details]
Standard mode

Comment 6 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 17:20:55 UTC

I tried to reproduce Albert's "Works fine for me" on Ubuntu 20.04 system with poppler 0.86. I'll try poppler 0.86 on the system that currently exhibits the issue and report back.

Comment 7 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 17:21:14 UTC

I was able to reproduce Albert's "Works fine for me" on Ubuntu 20.04 system with poppler 0.86. I'll try poppler 0.86 on the system that currently exhibits the issue and report back.

Comment 8 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 20:15:17 UTC

I rebuilt Okular 20.12.2 against poppler 0.86, but the issue persists on my system. Any ideas what component could cause the issue?

Comment 9 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-05 21:16:32 UTC

I built Okular 20.04.3 against poppler 0.86 (which matches the versions used in Ubuntu 20.04), but the issue persists on my system. Do you have any suggestions how to further debug?

Comment 10 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-06 01:31:29 UTC

I used qt5/demos/poppler_qt5viewer from poppler to confirm that this is a poppler bug.
If I compile qt5/demos/poppler_qt5viewer on Ubuntu 20.04, the checkboxes show up fine. On my Gentoo system they do not.

Comment 11 Leonard Lausen 2021-03-06 03:10:29 UTC

It turns out this is due to a mismatch in fontconfig (too recent) and font file (too old) in Gentoo. See https://bugs.gentoo.org/716856

I opened an upstream bug in Poppler to suggest the idea that poppler may warn the user if the chosen fallback font can't render all characters in the document: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/1054