I have encountered a peculiar situation where a PDF file displays as gibberish with certain PDF viewers but displays correctly with others. The PDF file in question can be downloaded from the site:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11856-017-1616-6 however, you might need an institutional subscription to view the full document, so I am temporarily posting a copy here: https://gmarks.org/cklppaper.pdf The file displays correctly using any of these programs: evince (version 3.22.1), zathura (version 0.3.7), acroread (version 9.5.5), mupdf (version 1.9a), xournal (version 0.4.8), gv (version 3.7.4). As you can perhaps confirm, the file does not display correctly--one sees only scattered mathematical symbols throughout the pages--if it is opened with any of the following programs: qpdfview (version 0.4.14), xpdf (version 3.04), okular (version 0.26.1). For example, here are screenshots of what the third page of the PDF file looks like on my machine as displayed in qpdfview and mupdf, respectively: https://gmarks.org/q03.png https://gmarks.org/m03.png The file prints correctly to a Postscript printer using lpr from the command line. Two questions: (1) Can anyone explain why the file opens correctly with certain PDF viewers but not with others? (2) Is there a way to convert it to a PDF file that renders correctly in every viewer? Regarding question (1), I don't think the PDF version of the file (version 1.6) is relevant; other PDF documents with this PDF version display correctly with qpdfview, etc. I don't think it has to do with the fact that qpdfview uses the Poppler library for rendering PDFs, as programs that displayed the document correctly use Poppler as well. Regarding question (2), I've tried running pdftops (which generates numerous "Missing or bad Type3 CharProc entry" syntax errors) followed by ps2pdf; the new PDF file still displays incorrectly using qpdfview, etc. Likewise pdf2ps followed by ps2pdf: the resulting PDF file appears in qpdfview as gibberish, albeit different gibberish than the original PDF file. Another failed attempt: "gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=new.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f cklppaper.pdf" also produces a new PDF file that will not display in qpdfview. Here is some additional information. I opened the file on a different, older Debian machine and was unable to reproduce the problem. The PDF file displayed correctly using qpdfview (version 0.4.14). Then I ran "sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade," after which qpdfview (version 0.4.14) no longer displayed the PDF file correctly. A number of packages were upgraded; I think the ones that caused the problem with qpdfview were: poppler-utils (0.48.0-2+deb9u1) over (0.48.0-2) libpoppler-qt5-1:amd64 (0.48.0-2+deb9u1) over (0.48.0-2) libpoppler-qt4-4:amd64 (0.48.0-2+deb9u1) over (0.48.0-2) libpoppler-glib8:amd64 (0.48.0-2+deb9u1) over (0.48.0-2) libpoppler64:amd64 (0.48.0-2+deb9u1) over (0.48.0-2) (Various other packages were upgraded, such as imagemagick-6-common and libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0, but I don't think those are relevant.) Regards, Greg Marks
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