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Introduction

Evince is the default application in Ubuntu for opening .pdf, .ps, .djvu and other similar types of files.

Most bugs related to Evince fall into 3 categories:

1. Evince crashes when I open a specific document (or when I open it and perform a specific action, like scroll, zoom or rotate)
2. Evince does not display ("render") the document correctly
3. Evince displays the document as it should, but then doesn't print it correctly

Common issues

Dvi files

Evince uses texlive to render .dvi files. If you cannot open a .dvi file (error message "Unable to open document. DVI document has incorrect format"), install the texlive package and try again. (There's bug report #42410 about correcting this error message)

CJK fonts

CJK stands for Chinese-Japanese-Korean. A pdf that includes such text but lacks the embedded fonts will not render correctly unless you install the package poppler-data.

Debugging procedure

Crash or Freeze

In case Evince crashes, follow standard DebuggingProgramCrash procedures.

Rendering issues

If the crash/incorrect rendering appears only with a specific document, obtaining that document will help. Here's a stock reply to use in this case:

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu even better!  It would be quite helpful if you attach the document you are having a problem with so we can better recreate this bug and work on fixing it.  Thanks in advance.

Once you have the document and have confirmed it doesn't render as it's supposed to in Evince, you have to find the right package for this bug. Evince uses:

• libpoppler for rendering pdf files

• libspectre for rendering postscript files

• libpango, libfreetype and fontconfig for fonts choosing and rendering

• libcairo for 2D vector graphics

Try opening it with different viewers to try and isolate the problem:

• Adobe Reader (package acroread, available in the Medibuntu repository)

• Xpdf (package xpdf-reader)

• ePdfView
• okular
• for .ps files: ghostscript

• for .djvu files: djVuLibre (package djview4)

When pdf files don't include the embedded fonts used in the document, then if Ubuntu doesn't have the specific font installed, it will search for the nearest equivalent, using fc-match <font>.

It might also be helpful to use the pdfinfo and pdffonts utils (included in the poppler-utils package).

Printing problems

Sometimes, when a document printed from evince doesn't print correctly, it is not a problem with Evince, but with cups, or the specific printer driver.

Other issues

How to Forward

• Upstream Evince bugs are at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=evince

• Upstream Poppler bugs are at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/query.cgi

Backporting Fixes

Bug fixes are normally backported to all supported Ubuntu releases (you can see which releases are still supported here).

However, this is not always possible, for example when the code architecture has changed significantly. This means that sometimes bugs are marked as "Fix Released" even when they have been fixed only in recent versions of evince/poppler/etc.

CategoryDebugging