New subject: [Bug 923346] Symbols incorrectly displayed

Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=923346

            Bug ID: 923346
           Summary: Symbols incorrectly displayed
           Product: Fedora
           Version: 18
         Component: google-croscore-fonts
          Severity: high
          Priority: unspecified
          Assignee: pnemade(a)redhat.com
          Reporter: jv+fedora(a)fcelda.cz
        QA Contact: extras-qa(a)fedoraproject.org
                CC: andreas.bierfert(a)lowlatency.de,
                    fonts-bugs(a)lists.fedoraproject.org,
                    i18n-bugs(a)lists.fedoraproject.org, jreznik(a)redhat.com,
                    kevin(a)tigcc.ticalc.org, ltinkl(a)redhat.com,
                    mike(a)cchtml.com, mkasik(a)redhat.com,
                    pnemade(a)redhat.com, rdieter(a)math.unl.edu,
                    richard(a)rsk.demon.co.uk, rnovacek(a)redhat.com,
                    stefan(a)lsd.co.za, than(a)redhat.com, tibbs(a)math.uh.edu
        Depends On: 901858

I'm seeing the same problem as described in bug #901858 with
google-croscore-symbolneu-fonts-1.21.0-4.fc18.noarch package. Removing the
package solves the problem and math symbols are displayed correctly.

google-croscore-symbolneu-fonts-1.21.0-4.fc18.noarch
okular-4.10.1-1.fc18.x86_64

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #901858 +++

Created attachment 683157
microchip pdf showing the fault

Description of problem:

When reading technical pdfs, the wrong symbols are displayed for some math
characters. e.g. pi is displayed as not equal, ohms as a vertical bar, and
micro (mu) is displayed as infinity.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

okular-4.9.5.-1.fc18

How reproducible:

Displaying a technical pdf such as 
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/AppNotes/00954A.pdf
shows the wrong symbols.
E.G. In figure 1 - the value for C2 is displayed as 470 (inf) F instead of 470
(mu) F

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Display technical pdf
2. 
3.

Actual results:
pi is displayed as not equals
ohms as a vertical bar
micro(mu) as infinity

Expected results:
The correct symbols should be displayed

Additional info:
Evince also has this problem, but emacs displays everything correctly.
This happens across a range of pdfs and I think is a serious bug than needs
fixing as soon as possible,. It reflects badly on fedora if we cannot display
technical specifications properly.

--- Additional comment from Kevin Kofler on 2013-01-19 12:47:09 EST ---

...
 Evince also has this problem 
Reassigning to poppler, which is the common library used by both.

What I see is that this PDF does not embed its fonts, which means you get
whatever fonts are installed on the system. In this case, Symbol is mapped to
wine-symbol-fonts. So I'm not sure whether poppler or the font is doing the
wrong thing there.

And by the way, the PDF is bad because it uses a font outside of the PostScript
standard (Symbol) and doesn't embed it. A portable PDF MUST embed all the
non-PostScript fonts it uses.

--- Additional comment from Richard Kennedy on 2013-02-28 07:57:45 EST ---

Just a quick update.

The new embedded pdf reader in Firefox 19 displays these files correctly too.

Well, the pdf may not be correct but it was created by adobe software & there
are lots of them out in the wild, so we should do something to fix it.
Can I change the default font mapping for popper to something else ? If so how
do I go about that?

--- Additional comment from Kevin Kofler on 2013-02-28 19:00:01 EST ---

As I said, it's a bug in either poppler or wine-symbol-fonts (or both).
Unfortunately, the poppler maintainer hasn't answered so far.

--- Additional comment from Marek Kašík on 2013-03-01 07:05:38 EST ---

Hi,

this is a bug in wine-symbol-fonts package. The symbol.ttf font has wrong
mapping.
For additional info see upstream bug
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24099.
I'm reassigning this to wine.

Regards

Marek

--- Additional comment from Jason Tibbitts on 2013-03-01 14:45:34 EST ---

Wow, it's great news that this the cause is known, because I've been struggling
with this for some time.  Unfortunately upstream bug report has been there for
quite some time with no progress, so I'm not sure what chance we have of
getting this fixed.  What would break by removing this font?  Can it be removed
from the dependency list of the wine-fonts metapackage?

--- Additional comment from Kevin Kofler on 2013-03-01 17:53:16 EST ---

Would that really fix the issue? I don't think the symbols can be properly
displayed if the font is entirely missing. I suspect there's no way around
fixing the font.

--- Additional comment from Richard Kennedy on 2013-03-02 11:50:34 EST ---

I've just fixed the font following the steps in the wine bug 24099 and it
works.
I only run one wine app, ltspice, and it still works after the fix, so it's all
looking good. 

Both firefox & emacs can display these characters properly so they must be
using some other font, but I don't know how to find out which one. But if we
could find out can we swap the mapping to that?

--- Additional comment from Richard Kennedy on 2013-03-02 13:29:50 EST ---

Having thought about this some more, I think that is more likely that the bug
really is that poppler isn't handling unicode characters properly.

I cut & pasted the failing mu character from evince into emacs, and it says
it's unicode 0x3BC. So it seems that poppler tries to use the symbol font and
0x3BC
 is something different in there because it's broken too.

emacs and firefox somehow resolve the unicode character correctly and don't end
up in the symbol font, but I haven't found out which font they do use.

I didn't realise all of this stuff was so involved and complex. At least fixing
up the font is a temporary fix.

--- Additional comment from Kevin Kofler on 2013-03-02 17:58:39 EST ---

Maybe poppler shouldn't be looking up "Symbol" in fontconfig at all, but
handle
the Symbol font specially? The Window$ Symbol TTF font which WINE's font tries
to emulate is a hack which predates Unicode and maps Greek letters and other
symbol characters to plain 8-bit characters (0-255). Somebody should probably
test what happens when you use the original M$ Symbol.ttf. If it has the same
issue, it's not WINE's fault.

--- Additional comment from Richard Kennedy on 2013-03-04 12:44:39 EST ---

Just a couple of notes :-

* The poppler version here is 0.20.2 which was released on Tue July 10, 2012,
and
the latest is 0.22.1 which contains quite a number of bug fixes.

* I've reset my machine to the default state and if I run pdftohtml on this
file 
the correct characters are generated in the html. (pdftohtml is a poppler
tool).

* Libre Office also can display these files correctly.

Is there any way to get poppler to use the opensymobol font to resolve these
symbols? AFAICT opensymbol contains all of the correct unicode so might make a
good replacement and it's already installed.

--- Additional comment from Marek Kašík on 2013-03-05 07:26:52 EST ---

Created attachment 705385
blacklist wine font Symbol

(In reply to comment #10)
...
 Just a couple of notes :-

 * The poppler version here is 0.20.2 which was released on Tue July 10,
 2012, and
 the latest is 0.22.1 which contains quite a number of bug fixes. 
The poppler-0.22.1 doesn't fix this.

...
 * I've reset my machine to the default state and if I run
pdftohtml on this
 file 
 the correct characters are generated in the html. (pdftohtml is a poppler
 tool). 
It generates correct html because the codes for those characters are correct in
the pdf.

...
 * Libre Office also can display these files correctly. 
Do you mean the html or the pdf? Libre Office displays me the same characters
as poppler when importing the pdf.

...
 Is there any way to get poppler to use the opensymobol font to
resolve these
 symbols? AFAICT opensymbol contains all of the correct unicode so might make
 a good replacement and it's already installed. 
Place the attached file to ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. This will blacklist
the font for all applications which use fontconfig (useful when the
wine-symbol-fonts is a dependency of a package which you don't want to remove).

I've tried to view a file with the character for the micro sign (UTF-8 code
0xC2B5) in notepad which is part of wine-common. After switching the font to
"Symbol", it showed me the incorrect symbol. I guess that there is really
something wrong with the font.

Regards

Marek

--- Additional comment from Kevin Kofler on 2013-03-05 10:00:50 EST ---

The problem is that the Symbol font was designed in a way that the 'm'
character is displayed as 'µ', and 'µ' is not mapped to anything. In
fact,
Symbol was the way to get those special characters in old software which didn't
support Unicode. I don't know whether it's possible to fix this issue without
breaking that old software when people try to run it under WINE. I hope it's
possible, but I'm not sure. The WINE upstream bug report has a proposed fix,
but I don't know whether that fix doesn't break the non-Unicode apps.

--- Additional comment from Andreas Bierfert on 2013-03-05 14:55:02 EST ---

Well as a workaround we could confine wine symbol to wine for now (like with
tahoma). This would reduce the problem to wine applications. 

Before resorting to this I will investigate a bit...

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[Bug 923346] New: Symbols incorrectly displayed