Printing certain documents yields characters scattered all over the page

Corrupt print in preview

Ubuntu 10.10
Evince 2.32.0
poppler/cairo (0.14.3)

I am experiencing the exact same bug when printing my electric bill PDF from evince. Seemingly random/strange characters are printed all over the document when printing from Evince it, but it renders correctly when viewing in Evince.

Even if I use "Print to file" I get the exact same result (see attached printing of Peter's PDF since I don't want my electric bill on the Internet [evince-print-to-file.pdf]). After printing to file, if I open the printed-to-file file, and then print it to file again, it adds more random characters.

I can print correctly from XPDF and Okular.

I am also experiencing this bug, using the pdf file from FinCEN:
http://www.fincen.gov/fin104_ctr.pdf

Characters are scattered over the document both printing to printer and to file from evince.

AMD x86_64
2.6.35-22-generic

Attached output.

Thank you for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments at: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629403

The document located at http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/1.2.x/spring-reference.pdf is an example.

I am also affected by this bug.
But contrary to the first posting, "print to file" has the same problem, and even the print preview contains the scattered letters.
The result from my experiments with the aforementioned spring-reference.pdf were:

- printing directly from evince has scattered letters
- printing to pdf has scattered letters
- selecting "print to file" with the pdf option yields scattered letters (in the print preview and the file)

- printing via command line "lpr spring-reference.pdf" works!
- printing to ps works
- selecting "print to file" with the ps option works (in the print preview and the file)
- other viewers (such as xpdf) work, because they simply use the "lpr" command

It also doesn't work with my personal pdf files, which were created by pdflatex. So they probably don't contain obscure propietary pdf extensions...

Thus I suspect a bug in the pdf processing of the gnome or evince printing framework.

As Toki pointed out, now my own documents, which I produce using pdflatex as well, have the same problem. If I print using the vieewer epdfview I have no problem.

This turned out to be a bug not in evince but in the cairo library (that evince uses for printing). I submitted it upstream and it got fixed immediately: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31062
Now the only task remaining is to get this fix into Ubuntu.

Changing the affected package to cairo.

The linked branch contains the backported upstream fix -- testing welcome!

Thanks Marcel!
I just tried your branch and all of the issues are gone. Printing to the printer works and so does printing to a file :)

Hey,

How long will it take for this patch to arrive in the maverick updates? Or can you explain to me what I have to do with the .patch files?

I updated to Maverick, because I though this would fix my printing issues.

Thanks!

Thank you for your work on that, the patch should land in natty and maverick-proposed in the next days

uploaded now, somebody from ubuntu-sru needs to approve the upload next

would somebody told me how to do the patch myself?
wanted to keep up with the new version of ubuntu. I ended up getting a huge bug.

Accepted cairo into maverick-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Confirming fix on Ubuntu 10.10 amd64. No more scrambled output.
Thanks!

I can also confirm the fix. I do not get scattered characters anymore. Thank you.

Works for me too...
Thanks for the effort people!

This bug was fixed in the package cairo - 1.10.0-1ubuntu3

---------------
cairo (1.10.0-1ubuntu3) maverick-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/05_fix_glyph_advance.patch
    Backport upstream fix for broken print output in evince. (LP: #661724)
 -- Marcel Stimberg <email address hidden> Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:56:57 +0200

Copied to natty, too

I am experiencing this issue with an up-to-date 11.10 Ubuntu system.

@luiscarlos: Are you sure you have the updates repository enabled? Could you run
apt-cache policy libcairo2
in a terminal and paste the ouput? Thanks.

I am experiencing this issue with Natty.

> # apt-cache policy libcairo2
> libcairo2:
> Installed: 1.10.2-2ubuntu2
> Candidate: 1.10.2-2ubuntu2
> Version table:
> *** 1.10.2-2ubuntu2 0
> 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main amd64 Packages
> 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

@luiscarlos and @jan-recreatie-zorg: all Ubuntu versions > 10.04 (maverick) have this specific issue fixed, I therefore think you are not seeing the same bug. In case you are seeing this problem even when printing to a file (like in this bug report), please report a new bug against libcairo2 (ideally using "ubuntu-bug libcairo2" in a terminal). It is helpful if you can attach an example file where you are experiencing this issue, together with the result of printing to a file. If you are only seeing the issue when printing to a real printer, report a bug against the CUPS package ("ubuntu-bug cups"). Ideally, follow the steps described here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingPrintingProblems#Capturing_print_job_data
Thanks in advance!

@marcelstimberg You are correct, this does not appear in print previews or while printing to a file. I will file a new bug report per your guidelines. :-) Thank you.

For anyone finding this bug report experiencing the same problem as me, have a look at this bug#277404. Specifically comment 35 in that bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/277404/comments/35

Changing LanguageLevel from 3 to 2 in the PPD file remedied this problem for me.