[texworks] Poppler image display issue

[Jonathan Kew]

On 5 Apr 2010, at 22:53, Casey P. Johnson wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> I am having a strange issue with pdf display. The attached .png files are
> images of the same pdf, one opened in TeXworks and the other in Foxit
> (acrobat reader display is similar to Foxit). The .zip file includes the
> individual images that are combined to make the .png files.
> 
> As you can see, each of the diagrams (generated by GraphViz), when opened
> in TeXworks, has some characters left out. What seems to be happening is
> the first character in each image is not being displayed, and then all
> other instances of that character in that image are also being omitted.
> 
> When I saw this, I was reminded of Benny Lautrup's issue back in February
> with included Mathematica files. I re-read most of the thread, and I think
> the main advice was to make sure that the correct fonts were embedded.
> 
> Both Foxit and Adobe Reader are telling me that the font is embedded (It's
> Courier New, anyway), so I am at a loss for ideas.
> 
> I can produce .gv -> .eps -> .pdf and it seems to work fine, but would
> like to understand why the path .gv -> .pdf doesn't work. If anyone has
> any insight, I would appreciate it.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Casey
> 
> P.S. I am using Miktex 2.8, various versions of TeXworks >= r.571 (on
> different machines with Windows XP / 7) and experiencing the same problem
> on all of them.<error.zip><foxit.png><TeXworks.png>

I see the same problem when viewing the GraphViz PDFs with Apple's Preview on OS X, so it's not unique to TeXworks (or to the poppler library). This leads me to suspect that there is something slightly non-standard about the way GV is writing them.

Determining whether this is in fact an error in the PDFs (one that some readers happen to tolerate better than others), or merely an "unusual" construction that triggers a similar bug in both poppler and Preview, would require a careful examination of the PDFs and of the PDF specification. But if GV is producing PDFs that are incompatible with several widespread viewers, whether or not they are strictly conforming to the spec, I'd say this is an issue worth reporting to the GV developers.

JK