Hello, thanks for your efforts and happy new year! Let's make a summary
of discussions till now so we can probably move on ;-)
The facts (and problems):
1. The special case in those PDF files is they does not have Chinese fonts
embedded. Many daily used files fall in this kind (such as research papers on
CNKI which is very widely used in China's academic interests).
2. The problem does not only exist in Chinese PDF rendering, but also some
other random applications which hard code to use "sans-serif" fonts.
3. With current 69-language-selector-zh-xy.conf, and with poppler-data
installed, the Chinese text in those PDF files are shown as squares.
4. xpdf with xpdf-chinese-* installed can render those PDF files correctly,
Adobe Reader can do it as well.
5. Cannot reproduce this problem on Debian when we change the font settings
manually in gnome-appearance-properties to make the user experience just like
Ubuntu.
More on technical details:
Programs cannot handle fontconfig configurations correctly when it needs
to show Chinese contents. Fontconfig assumes applications will find font
faces in the list order, if it fails in the former ones, then move and
find it in latter ones, but those buggy applications only find font
faces in the first font listed.
Ubuntu's approach to font settings is to have an English font (commonly
Dejavu or Bitstream Vera) with higher priority, and Chinese fonts with
lower priority. Users benefit from such settings because English
typefaces in Chinese fonts are usually not that good-looking. Most of
the desktop applications work well.
Proposed solutions, with pros and cons:
1. Remove English fonts from
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-xy.conf.
This one would make it able to show those PDF files correctly, but forces
people to use English typefaces provided by Chinese fonts, which lower the user
experience so it is a regression. This is a quick bug ugly solution.
2. Fix poppler-data and all relevant applications so they can honor fontconfig
settings correctly.
This one is not a quick-and-dirty fixed that can be applied by users
themselves as previous one. But this should be the correct way - xpdf and Adobe
Reader can do well, so their is no reason that poppler can't by fixing relevant
codes. This is technically a "better" solution, but takes longer time to
achieve.
** Summary changed:
- subject: Remove the string tags include Bitstream Vera、DejaVu inside in the
setting file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-xy.conf where xy
represents cn, hk, mo, sg and tw individually.
+ Chinese characters in PDFs without embedded fonts are shown as squares
** Description changed:
- This bug report was originally posted by xenomorph0525 on 2010/10/7 23:33:05.
- Its url :
http://www.ubuntu-tw.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=148050#forumpost148050
- I help translate it into English and post it here.
+ Chinese characters in PDFs without embedded fonts are shown as squares,
+ more analysis please read comment #14[1]. Samples are attached.
- description: We only describe the setting file
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-tw.conf for brief purpose, but
- the same situation may apply to the following setting files:
- /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-cn.conf
- /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-hk.conf
- /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-mo.conf
- /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-sg.conf
+ (Change the bug description so people would be easier to jump in and
+ know what's the problem. Thanks to people from ubuntu-tw.org, who
+ reported this bug.)
- Under traditional chinese environment in Linux system, which font will become
the first choice and dominate the print output in Serif、Sans、Monospace
typefaces depends on the order of the string tags, like <string>...</string>,
in the setting file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-tw.conf.
- Since there is not any traditional chinese character in the Bitstream Vera
font and DejaVu font, it will appear a square in some applications, like Evince.
- So remove the following string tags include Bitstream Vera、DejaVu inside from
the setting file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-tw.conf will
resolve this problem.
-
- <string>Bitstream Vera Serif</string>
- <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
-
- <string>Bitstream Vera Sans</string>
- <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
-
- <string>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</string>
- <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string>
-
- Thank you for your kind attention in advance.
+ [1]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-
+ translations/+bug/659280/comments/14
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/659280
Title:
Chinese characters in PDFs without embedded fonts are shown as squares
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