Bug#481887: evince: text selecting/highlighting issues

[Karl Chen]

Package: evince
Version: 2.20.2-1+b1
Severity: minor


Sample 1:

This PDF: 
    http://www.tim-taylor.com/papers/thesis/thesis.pdf [5 MB]

renders fine with Evince.  However, when I select text with
the mouse, I see gibberish text in the highlighted region,
in a different font (some kind of sans serif).  The
gibberish seems to be the original text where each
character's encoding value is 2 less than it should be,
e.g. "Copy" shows up as "Anmw", with each character
positioned where the original was, so that a lot of
characters overlap each other since the font and characters
are different.  This occurs when selecting text of any font
in this document.

With most PDFs I get the expected behavior of the same text
being rendered, in the same font.

Except for ff/fi ligatures, pdftotext converts the text
portions of the PDF fine, and in Evince despite the
gibberish appearing on screen, the selected text copies to
clipboard fine (both PRIMARY upon select and CLIPBOARD upon
Ctrl+C).  Acrobat Reader 8 works fine when selecting text in
this PDF (also except ligatures).

Pdfinfo output:
     
    Title:          main.dvi
    Creator:        dvipsk 5.58f Copyright 1986, 1994 Radical Eye Software
    Producer:       Acrobat Distiller Daemon 3.01 for Solaris 2.3 and later (SPARC)
    CreationDate:   Wed Aug 25 10:36:44 1999
    Tagged:         no
    Pages:          317
    Encrypted:      no
    Page size:      595 x 842 pts (A4)
    File size:      5344024 bytes
    Optimized:      no
    PDF version:    1.2


Sample 2:

I also discovered in /usr/share/X11/doc/fonts/fonts.pdf
(found in Debian package xorg-docs), that selecting works as
expected, except when highlighting Courier-font XML text.
The XML tag name and first word after tags (i.e. matching
perl regexp /(?<=[<>])\w+?(?=[<>]|$)/) disappears (as if
highlighting spaces) but the rest highlights fine;
everything copies to clipboard fine.  This is a "modern"
PDF-1.4 output by pdflatex.  This might be unrelated to the
issue above; could file a separate bugreport if that's
better.


These issues occurred identically on three different Debian
machines.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers oldstable
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (60, 'unstable'), (40, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages evince depends on:
ii  gconf2                 2.22.0-1          GNOME configuration database syste
ii  ghostscript-x [gs-esp] 8.62.dfsg.1-2     The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF
ii  gnome-icon-theme       2.22.0-1          GNOME Desktop icon theme
ii  libart-2.0-2           2.3.20-1          Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0            1.22.0-1          The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbonobo2-0           2.22.0-1          Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libbonoboui2-0         2.22.0-1          The Bonobo UI library
ii  libc6                  2.7-10            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcairo2              1.4.14-1          The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.2.1-1           simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.74-2            simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdjvulibre21         3.5.20-6          Runtime support for the DjVu image
ii  libgconf2-4            2.22.0-1          GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0            1:2.6.2-1         library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.16.1-2          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-keyring0      2.22.1-1          GNOME keyring services library
ii  libgnome2-0            2.20.1.1-1        The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0      2.20.1.1-1        A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgnomeui-0           2.20.1.1-1        The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0         1:2.22.0-2        GNOME Virtual File System (runtime
ii  libgtk2.0-0            2.12.9-2          The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libice6                2:1.0.4-1         X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libjpeg62              6b-14             The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG 
ii  libkpathsea4           2007.dfsg.1-2     TeX Live: path search library for 
ii  libnautilus-extension1 2.20.0-3          libraries for nautilus components 
ii  liborbit2              1:2.14.12-0.1     libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0          1.20.2-2          Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpoppler-glib2       0.6.4-1           PDF rendering library (GLib-based 
ii  libpopt0               1.10-3            lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libsm6                 2:1.0.3-1+b1      X11 Session Management library
ii  libstdc++6             4.3.0-3           The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libtiff4               3.8.2-8           Tag Image File Format (TIFF) libra
ii  libx11-6               2:1.0.3-7         X11 client-side library
ii  libxml2                2.6.32.dfsg-2     GNOME XML library
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-12 compression library - runtime

evince recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information