Italics lost or garbled in output PDF

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately, we can't fix it because your description didn't include enough information.

In addition to the information you provided, we need:
1. The version of Ubuntu you are using - use lsb_release -rd in a terminal to find this; copy and paste the results to your comments
2. The version of Abiword you found this in - use apt-cache policy abiword in a terminal to find this; copy and paste the results to your comments

Thanks!

Ubuntu

Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release: 8.04

ABIWord

 Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 2.4.6-3ubuntu3
  Version table:
     2.4.6-3ubuntu3 0
        500 http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages

Abiword itself in the help>about Abiword says v 2.4.6

Details of the *italic* fonts listed:

Georgia: pdf okay v. 2.05 153.0 KB
DejaVu Sans: italicization lost in PDF, text not garbled Version 2.23 577.5 KB [no italic version]
FreeSans: italicization lost and text garbled in PDF Version $Revision: 1.30 $ 240.4 KB [style says "oblique"]
TimesNewRoman: PDF okay v 2.82 241.3 KB
Impact: italicization lost, text not garbled v 2.35 132.9 KB [no italic version]
Trebuchet: PDF okay v 1.22 136.0 KB
Andale Mono: italicization lost v 2.00 103.0 KB [no italic version]
Arial: okay v 2.82 201.3 KB
Bitstream Charter: okay [This is a .PCF font in /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi]
Bitstream Vera Sans: italicization lost Release 1.10 62.2 KB [style says "oblique"]
Bitstream Vera Serif: italicization lost Release 1.10 58.9 KB [no italic version]
Comic Sans: italicization lost v 2.10 123.4 KB [no italic version]

This glitch appears to be correlated with the absence of a italic version of the font; the "italic" characters in such cases are auto-slanted within the font rendering system. Having a style "oblique" in the italic version of the font also seems correlated with glitchiness, but inconsistently. Notice the difference in behavior between FreeSans and Bitstream Vera Sans.

There may be more than one bug involved.

I should also add that there are three possible culprits: Abiword itself; the library used to generate PDFs from Abiword; and the standard Ubuntu pdf viewer, Evince Document Viewer 2.22.2 "Using poppler 0.6.4 (cairo)"

@RFW: can you take a look at http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10996 and let me know if it is the same? If it is not, I will file this on bugzilla and link it here so we can follow it. Thanks.

I can't tell for certain if these two reports are for the same bug or not.

This bug (Launchpad #286536) involves improper handling of italicized text, whereas Bugzilla #10996 involves mishandling of unusual characters.

Both could be caused by a single bug in PDF font embedding or subsetting, but there could be more than one bug of that nature.

I am attaching the actual PDF (not the PNG screen snapshot attached earlier) so someone versed in reading the entrails of a PDF can diagnose what the underlying difficulty is, not just the appearance of the display of the PDF.

I suggest that you adopt a working hypothesis that these reports are all due to the same underlying bug, but be prepared to discover that they aren't.

Thank you for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11838

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Lucid Lynx. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

Should be fixed in lucid.