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

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2020-10-27 00:06, xiota wrote:
> not all monospace fonts have the same metrics as Courier

How important is that? Are you aware of any monospace font where it
would still be messed up?

Since what I propose is an Ubuntu only patch, I would prefer to keep it
as simple as possible. If someone (you?) would propose an upstream merge
request

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig

the addition you would like to see would be more motivated IMO.

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Title:
  wrong kerning in SS-5 PDF form fields

Status in Poppler:
  New
Status in fontconfig package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  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)

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