[texworks] Poppler problem

[Jonathan Kew]

On 27 Sep 2008, at 5:01 PM, gkv1 at mac.com wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've noticed that Poppler does not always display PDF files  
> correctly; sometimes fonts are missing. Perhaps this is already  
> known, but if not I've posted an example to
>  www.princeton.edu/~gkv/temp.pdf
> This is a single figure that, when opened in texworks (latest  
> version) either stand-alone or in a tex document, does not display  
> the axis labels, at least on my home system and my laptop (Mac OS  
> 10.5.4). It displays properly in preview and acrobat.

This is a known problem. (Well, it's known to me, at least! I think  
you're the first to actually encounter and report it, though.)

The issue is that your figure does not have the necessary fonts  
embedded (it uses Helvetica, one of the "base" PDF fonts), but the  
poppler library I'm currently using was built without support for non- 
embedded fonts. I suspect it'd work OK on Linux, but for the Mac and  
Windows builds I don't want to require fontconfig, and that means I  
need to do some work on the font handling side of things.

It's not normally a problem for TeX-generated documents, where the  
usual processing paths result in all the fonts being embedded. But I  
realize there can be an issue with externally-generated PDF figures  
that you want to include.

I'll try to look into this; it's something I was aware of, but it  
didn't seem very urgent as no-one was complaining (until now!) :)

Thanks for the report & sample,

JK