bug#43815: emacs-pdf-tools often doesn't display text

bug#43815: emacs-pdf-tools often doesn't display text

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Hi!

For a few weeks (since Emacs 27?) I've experienced an issue with
emacs-pdf-tools: many PDFs don't display any text.  If I convert the PDF
to PDF with Ghostscript then it displays properly.

For now I only have private PDFs to reproduce, I still need to found a
public PDF.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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bug#43815: emacs-pdf-tools often doesn't display text

[zimoun]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2020 at 16:56, Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> wrote:

> For now I only have private PDFs to reproduce, I still need to found a
> public PDF.

How do you produce these private PDFs?


> Has anyone else experienced this?

No on the PDFs I have tried.

Cheers,
simon

bug#43815: emacs-pdf-tools often doesn't display text

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

> How do you produce these private PDFs?

I don't know, these are PDFs I receive over emails.
I suspect they are generated by some *Office processor.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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bug#43815: emacs-pdf-tools often doesn't display text

[zimoun]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2020 at 19:29, Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> wrote:

> > How do you produce these private PDFs?
>
> I don't know, these are PDFs I receive over emails.
> I suspect they are generated by some *Office processor.

Well, what happens with other PDF readers (MuPDF, etc.)?

From my experience, these kinds of PDFs are badly generated and
contain unexpected content; some readers ignore it, some other ones
are unhappy.  For example, I remember a completely different rendering
of the same PDF depending on MuPDF vs Evince vs Xpdf, and the PDF was
generated by Mac tools.

I am reading really large PDFs with emacs-pdf-tools (PhD thesis or
scientific books) and until now I have never had an issue.  And I am
also reading PDFs with "complex" rendering such as scientific articles
(multicolumns, figures, fonts, etc.) without any issue.

Without any backtrace, warning or error message, it is hard to tell if
it comes from emacs-pdf-tools and (more probably) your PDFs. :-)


All the best,
simon