In Kubuntu 12.04 pre-release Okular didn't show any text in http://www.toyota-global.com/sustainability/report/sr/10/pdf/sustainability_report10.pdf I turned on all okular flags in kdebugdialog, and get a lot of PDFGeneratorPopplerDebugFunction: [Poppler] "Error: Missing language pack for 'Adobe-Japan1' mapping" PDFGeneratorPopplerDebugFunction: [Poppler] "Error: Unknown font tag 'C0_0'" PDFGeneratorPopplerDebugFunction: [Poppler] "Error (83NNNN): No font in show" errors. The fix was to install the poppler-data package. Even though this is an English-language document, it still depends on some special font encoding information. Ubuntu is supposedly going to install poppler-data for all languages (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/893920), but it seems this workaround should be mentioned in the Okular FAQ to save time and head-banging :-) I suggest in http://okular.kde.org/faq.php under "Running Okular" add On Linux, I don't see any text in a PDF, what should I do? Answer: You may need to ensure you have the package "poppler-data" installed. In many Linux distributions this package has additional font encoding information used by CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts. Even if a PDF only uses Western characters, it may need this information.
Imo, I'd argue this is a distro issue. http://poppler.freedesktop.org/ includes the statement: Besides poppler you are also going to need poppler encoding data: poppler-data-0.4.5.tar.gz so, distros ought to add appropriate dependencies to ensure poppler-data is present along with the poppler libraries. (Fwiw, we went through the issue in fedora awhile back, and added said dependency after consulting poppler upstream)
SVN commit 1288466 by aacid: Mention poppler-data M +2 -0 faq.php WebSVN link: http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=1288466