Re: [Tools-discuss] RFC PDF crashes viewer

[Erik Auerswald <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 09:10:23PM -0400, John R Levine wrote:
> >(Background for my initial observation: When you give an assignment
> >to students and their favorite PDF viewer crashes on the required
> >reading material, they’ll simply say they can’t do the assignment
> >instead of trying out other readers.)

If there are Ubuntu users among your students that experienced
the problem, perhaps you could ask them to add a "mee too" to
the Ubuntu bug report (Launchpad / Ubuntu One account required;
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/1885313/+affectsmetoo)?
Perhaps they can add additional affected version information (e.g.,
if Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is affected as well, as it most probably is).

> Since the PDF RFCs display without trouble in the default viewers on
> Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and Chrome, I am impressed at the
> creativity of your students who went to the effort to find a PDF
> viewer that didn't work.

Since evince is the default PDF viewer for GNOME, it is the default PDF
viewer for many popular GNU/Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat,
Fedora, and probably quite a few more).  Since quite a few students tend
to use GNU/Linux, this is does not need creativity at all.

The files are displayed correctly without any warning or error messages
using other free software PDF viewers, e.g., Okular, xpdf and the built-in
Firefox PDF viewer.  They are displayed correctly, but with warning
and/or error messages, using the free software PDF viewers MuPDF and gv.

Okular, the default KDE PDF viewer, shows an obviously wrong date for
the attached XML file (I do not have all the details, since I do not
use Okular myself).

The free software tool pdftk can be used to create a PDF file with
attached XML that works without problems in evince (and all the other
mentioned PDF viewers).

So there are workarounds.  I would like for evince to become more robust.
I do not expect the RFC PDF renderings to be perfect.

Thanks,
Erik
-- 
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
                        -- Philip K. Dick