Re: some PDFs fail to render using okular/evince/zathura on FC36
On Wed, 5 Oct 2022 23:35:57 -0500
Ranjan Maitra <mlmaitra(a)gmx.com> wrote:
Dear friends,
Over the past few months, I have noticed that some PDF documents do
not render on Fedora 36 using zathura, evince or okular. The PDF
document, however renders fine on my phone. All of them are PDF,
version 1.5, and they were sent to me by email, which I read using
mutt.
What could be wrong and how could I trouble-shoot/fix this? Note that
I can read many other PDFs using the same mailer, so there is
something different with some PDFs (received by email) and read by
using mutt.
I'm naive about pdf troubleshooting, but can you try sending yourself a
document that when you download it works properly? That is, can you
find a pdf somewhere that works fine when you grab it from fedora, but
doesn't work fine if it is sent to you via email. Without a way to
reproduce the problem consistently and tell whether it is the program or
the sending that is causing the problem, it is going to be very
difficult to track down.
So, I did a little search on this problem, a learning experience.
Turns out that there are many different kinds of pdfs. Who knew? Some
links.
https://support.veeva.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411930373019-What-is-PDF-A-a...
https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/problem-rendering-pdf...
https://windowsreport.com/failed-to-load-pdf-document/
https://www.inkit.com/blog/common-html-into-pdf-rendering-problems
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15858199/how-to-troubleshoot-badly-re...
After looking at those, I think the problem is that someone is
configuring their pdf in ways that are incompatible with the readers
you have. Why does it work in the phone? It could be that they are
using tools from google to create the pdf, and the phone uses the tools
provided by google to view the pdf, tuned to work with the creation
tools, so the errors aren't evident.