PDF Slightly broken - Missing Cap "A"?


General Discussion (Prerelease)


Please note, I am running Ubuntu Hardy Heron with Evince Document viewer, but I am missing all Cap Letter "A"s in the header portions, so when I look at BARBARIAN, I see B RB RI N. Quite strange, I doubt this is a problem for the Adobe product users, but I do not have that option. I am certain I am in a small (very small) minority, but thought I should bring it to attention, as this should be fixed before final release.

It also shows up in the sub headers where cap "A"'s are shown.

Here is a sample image.
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g213/Biokanan/MissingA.png

EDIT: Just noticed some other small formatting errors on my end. The shaded boxes have messed up shading, for example, if you look at page 15 in the top corner my shaded box covers around 2/3 of the total text area, once again, a small error, but still it could used fixed for the final version, I will try and find out how hard these errors will be to fix.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

No missing As using windows and adobe. :P

Liberty's Edge

I'm also a Linux user and also have this issue. I saw a thread in the archives a while back that looked like Paizo thinks this is actually a viewer problem and not an issue with the PDF.


I presumed it was a viewer problem, however they can still probably repair it on their end, though I am not certain how, maybe something to help improve compatibility. I imagine, if they can make the file using an older version of Adobe it may improve the compatibility.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

The Faceless King wrote:
I presumed it was a viewer problem, however they can still probably repair it on their end, though I am not certain how, maybe something to help improve compatibility. I imagine, if they can make the file using an older version of Adobe it may improve the compatibility.

The problem is that the Poppler PDF renderer used by Evince doesn't like one of our fonts. It's fine with any other PDF renderer.


I'll try running it through some other PDF viewers to see if any of them work better.

Liberty's Edge

I was able to down Adobe 8 from the acrobat site. A slight pain to install with Ubuntu's (Feisty) sudo mechanism. The As show up in Adobe, but I don't know how well it would work for you (if at all).


Well, I tried it with KPDF and ePDFviewer, neither worked, might I ask how you installed Reader 8? I didn't think Adobe supported 'Nix.

Liberty's Edge

I think KPDF, ePDF and XPDF (another one I've tried) are all poppler based.

I went to the adobe page and clicked Get Adobe Reader. It automatically detected Linux, but pointed me to the .rpm package. Choose different operating system and get one of the tarballs. I untar'ed it on my desktop. There is a README in the tarball with the installation instructions. I moved the AdobeReader to /opt and then ran

sudo ./INSTALL

Have to add it to the Applications menu manually, though.


I also use Hardy Heron. Get acroread from the synaptics package manager and install that. It is able to display the "A" correctly.


The Faceless King wrote:
Well, I tried it with KPDF and ePDFviewer, neither worked, might I ask how you installed Reader 8? I didn't think Adobe supported 'Nix.

While I generally use Evince I've started using KPDF because it seems to render faster and fixes everything except the "A". The A is quite frustrating... lets all file a bug report with the library maintainers. I'm a little suck of this big 'A' Hole in my PDFs.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Dennis da Ogre wrote:
...lets all file a bug report with the library maintainers. I'm a little suck of this big 'A' Hole in my PDFs.

Please do. You have my permission to upload problematic PDFs you downloaded from us to them for the purposes of troubleshooting this problem.

Liberty's Edge

I recently dumped Vista to the curb in favor of Ubuntu, and I've seen the infamous missing A in Paizo's pdfs. After some searching, it looks like the problem is with freetype and not poppler. I have not tested the development version of freetype myself, but here are the details:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/poppler/+bug/252250:
"it (the headline A in the paizo pdfs) works fine here using poppler 0.9.3 and freetype from development version, but fails with poppler 0.9.3 and freetype 2.3.7 (latest stable version)"


molrak wrote:

I recently dumped Vista to the curb in favor of Ubuntu, and I've seen the infamous missing A in Paizo's pdfs. After some searching, it looks like the problem is with freetype and not poppler. I have not tested the development version of freetype myself, but here are the details:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/poppler/+bug/252250:
"it (the headline A in the paizo pdfs) works fine here using poppler 0.9.3 and freetype from development version, but fails with poppler 0.9.3 and freetype 2.3.7 (latest stable version)"

thanks molrak, Hopefully they will release a new version... soon.


Broken:
(Windows) SumatraPDF, 0.9.3

Works:
(Windows) Foxit Reader, 2.3

Both excellent PDF readers, superior in speed and usability to Adobe.

Regards,
Ruemere

Liberty's Edge

I've taken the trouble of identifying a couple of likely patches that went into FT2 since release 2.3.7 was cut. I'm going to test if any fix the rendering problem and post the results. If that helps, I can submit those patches to at least Ubuntu's bugtracker, since the Freetype folks tend to cut, at best, a single release per year. If that many.

Liberty's Edge

See https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=24430 - if you're comfortable with rebuilding libraries yourself, rebuilding Freetype with the patch out of this bug applied fixes the problem. I'm off to Ubuntu's tracker to propose this.

Liberty's Edge

Sorry to resurrect an old thread. With the latest alpha of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), the missing A problem is no more. Hopefully this means that regular Ubuntu users won't be hassled with the missing A in poppler-based pdf readers (including evince) from Jaunty onwards. Evince still isn't perfect (I still get a few glitches on maps and other images with transparency), but at least everything should be legible.


I'm a Linux user, and I also had problems with the images while reading Pathfinder pdf's using evince, specially with "The Great Beyond". But Okular (it uses QT libs, is the standard pdf reader on KDE4 desktop) reads those pdfs perfectly.

Community / Forums / Archive / Pathfinder / Playtests & Prerelease Discussions / Pathfinder Roleplaying Game / General Discussion (Prerelease) / PDF Slightly broken - Missing Cap "A"? All Messageboards
Recent threads in General Discussion (Prerelease)
Druid / Monk?