Comment 8 for bug 26118

I AM AN IDIOT^H^H^H^H^H NEWBIE. Sorry for the caps, but I have given you BAD debugging information. Sorrysorrysorry.

OK, here's the deal. The above screenshots are taken from Evince, but I had other screenshots taken from xpdf. I originally thought (due to mislabeling of one file, perhaps) that the same issue arose with xpdf and Evince/Kpdf, but this is NOT the case.

The problem exists only with Evince and Kpdf, and NOT, repeat, NOT with xpdf. Indeed, upon further experimentation, I have found that:

1. Rendering the above file (or other PDF files generated by pdflatex) with xpdf gives THE SAME RESULTS under both Ubuntu Breezy and OpenSuse 10.0.

2. Rendering the same files with Evince or Kpdf gives inferior results on Breezy relative to OpenSuse, as documented by the above screenshots.

BOTTOM LINE: I think Poppler is to blame. xpdf uses t1lib to render Type 1 fonts, and indeed pdflatex embeds Type 1 fonts. Evince and Kpdf instead use poppler-->freetype2 to render both Type 1 and TrueType fonts. Now, it turns out that t1lib does a much better job than freetype2 with Type 1 fonts.

So, perhaps Suse has patched Evince, Kpdf & Co. to use t1lib instead of Poppler for Type 1 fonts. In any case, I cannot get the nice output I get with xpdf from kpdf or evince :-(

Hopefully this clarifies the situation. Again, sorry for the initial mistake I made.