[Bug 1824260] [NEW] wrong kerning in SS-5 PDF form fields

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

You have been subscribed to a public bug by Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj):

What I expected to happen:

I am filling out the SS-5 Social Security Administration form (see
attached). I entered "John Jacob Smith" into the "First", "Full Middle
Name", and "Last" fields on page 5.

What happened instead:

I can enter the text without issue, but some of the letters are wrongly
positioned, i.e. the kerning is wrong. For example, the letter "i"
overlaps with the letter "m" in "Smith" (see attached image). It looks
like the font in the fields might be displaying a variable width font
when it is supposed to be a fixed-wdith font.

Discussion:

Since this bug is also present in xpdf and Okular (but not mupdf), I'm
guessing this isn't a bug in Evince itself. However, I am reporting it
here as a courtesy to other users (since Evince is the default PDF
reader) and because I'm not sure which dependency is responsible. (I'm
also not sure if it's a direct dependency problem or if it's something
else like a font configuration issue.)

Here is the output for pdffonts ss-5.pdf:

name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
IHPIKC+ArialMT                       CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes    824  0
ArialMT                              TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     826  0
Arial-BoldMT                         TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     828  0
CourierStd                           Type 1            WinAnsi          no  no  no     145  0
Helvetica                            Type 1            WinAnsi          no  no  no     197  0
MyriadPro-Regular                    Type 1            WinAnsi          no  no  no     198  0
ZapfDingbats                         Type 1            ZapfDingbats     no  no  no     199  0

I asked about this in an Ask Ubuntu question nearly a year ago, but
received no response, so I am reporting a bug now instead:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1031235/wrong-letter-positioning-and-
font-in-pdf-form

Ubuntu version:

Description:	Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Release:	18.04

evince version:

$ apt-cache policy evince
evince:
  Installed: 3.28.4-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 3.28.4-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 3.28.4-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.28.2-1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: evince 3.28.4-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-47.50-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-47-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.6
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Wed Apr 10 21:27:11 2019
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-12-12 (119 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 18.04.1 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180725)
SourcePackage: evince
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

** Affects: poppler
     Importance: Unknown
         Status: New

** Affects: fontconfig (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Low
     Assignee: Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)
         Status: In Progress


** Tags: amd64 apport-bug bionic patch
-- 
wrong kerning in SS-5 PDF form fields
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1824260
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