some PDFs fail to render using okular/evince/zathura on FC36

[Ranjan Maitra]

Dear friends,

Over the past few months, I have noticed that some PDF documents do not render on Fedora
36 using zathura, evince or okular. The PDF document, however renders fine on my phone.
All of them are PDF, version 1.5, and they were sent to me by email, which I read using
mutt.

What could be wrong and how could I trouble-shoot/fix this? Note that I can read many
other PDFs using the same mailer, so there is something different with some PDFs (received
by email) and read by using mutt.

Many thanks and best wishes,
Ranjan

[stan]

On Wed, 5 Oct 2022 23:35:57 -0500
Ranjan Maitra <mlmaitra(a)gmx.com&gt; wrote:

>  Dear friends,
>  
>  Over the past few months, I have noticed that some PDF documents do
>  not render on Fedora 36 using zathura, evince or okular. The PDF
>  document, however renders fine on my phone. All of them are PDF,
>  version 1.5, and they were sent to me by email, which I read using
>  mutt.
>  
>  What could be wrong and how could I trouble-shoot/fix this? Note that
>  I can read many other PDFs using the same mailer, so there is
>  something different with some PDFs (received by email) and read by
>  using mutt. 
I'm naive about pdf troubleshooting, but can you try sending yourself a
document that when you download it works properly?  That is, can you
find a pdf somewhere that works fine when you grab it from fedora, but
doesn't work fine if it is sent to you via email.  Without a way to
reproduce the problem consistently and tell whether it is the program or
the sending that is causing the problem, it is going to be very
difficult to track down.

So, I did a little search on this problem, a learning experience.
Turns out that there are many different kinds of pdfs.  Who knew?  Some
links.

https://support.veeva.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411930373019-What-is-PDF-A-a...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/problem-rendering-pdf...

https://windowsreport.com/failed-to-load-pdf-document/

https://www.inkit.com/blog/common-html-into-pdf-rendering-problems

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15858199/how-to-troubleshoot-badly-re...

After looking at those, I think the problem is that someone is
configuring their pdf in ways that are incompatible with the readers
you have.  Why does it work in the phone?  It could be that they are
using tools from google to create the pdf, and the phone uses the tools
provided by google to view the pdf, tuned to work with the creation
tools, so the errors aren't evident.

[Ranjan Maitra]

On Thu Oct06'22 07:55:42AM, Community Support for Fedora Users wrote:
>  From: stan via users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
>
>  I'm naive about pdf troubleshooting, but can you try sending yourself a
>  document that when you download it works properly?  That is, can you
>  find a pdf somewhere that works fine when you grab it from fedora, but
>  doesn't work fine if it is sent to you via email.  Without a way to
>  reproduce the problem consistently and tell whether it is the program or
>  the sending that is causing the problem, it is going to be very
>  difficult to track down.
>
>  So, I did a little search on this problem, a learning experience.
>  Turns out that there are many different kinds of pdfs.  Who knew?  Some
>  links.
>
>
> https://support.veeva.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411930373019-What-is-PDF-A-a...
>
>  https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/problem-rendering-pdf...
>
>  https://windowsreport.com/failed-to-load-pdf-document/
>
>  https://www.inkit.com/blog/common-html-into-pdf-rendering-problems
>
>  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15858199/how-to-troubleshoot-badly-re...
>
>  After looking at those, I think the problem is that someone is
>  configuring their pdf in ways that are incompatible with the readers
>  you have.  Why does it work in the phone?  It could be that they are
>  using tools from google to create the pdf, and the phone uses the tools
>  provided by google to view the pdf, tuned to work with the creation
>  tools, so the errors aren't evident.
>  _____________________________________ 
Thanks for the detailed response. When I save the document and open with evince, I get:

 Unable to open document: file://home/..././51214686.pdf
 Failed to read the document catalog

pdffonts (from the stackoverflow page) gives:

       $ pdffonts ./51214686.pdf
       Syntax Error: Couldn't find trailer dictionary
       Syntax Error: Catalog object is wrong type (null)
       Syntax Error: Couldn't find trailer dictionary
       Internal Error: xref num -1 not found but needed, try to reconstruct<0a>
       Syntax Error: Couldn't find trailer dictionary
       Syntax Error: Couldn't find trailer dictionary
       Syntax Error: Catalog object is wrong type (null)
       Syntax Error: Couldn't read page catalog

Further

  $ file 51214686.pdf
  51214686.pdf: PDF document, version 1.5


Not quite sure how to troubleshoot this.

Many thanks, and best wishes,
Ranjan