[Poppler-bugs] [Bug 68360] Fuzzy rendering in SplashOutputDev in latest releases

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68360

Charles Hyder <dr.hyder at gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|INVALID                     |---

--- Comment #4 from Charles Hyder <dr.hyder at gmail.com> ---
Reopning the bug due to it being inappropriately closed.

(In reply to comment #3)
> I think you don't understand it, i don't think there's any bug, Adobe does
> the same, so I'm going to close this. If you can prove we behave differently
> to any other PDF renderer please reopen the bug.
> 

http://ge.tt/3AEJrIq/v/0 -- this is a result of the PDF file linked to in the
first post related to this bug (http://ge.tt/56fxgSp/v/0?c) being rendered in
Adobe Acrobat Pro v. 10.1.3. To avoid further replies along the lines of "I
think you don't understand it" here are detailed instructions to follow:

1) open the page http://ge.tt/3AEJrIq/v/0
2) click on the "download" link on the left
3) open the image with a good image viewer, like irfanview
4) set the magnification of the image viewer at 100%
5) observe the fact all pixels of the PDF rendered on screen by Adobe have
intensities either (0,0,0) or (255,255,255), i.e. are either black or white --
there's no anti-aliasing, "filtering" or anything else like that.
6) Note two important facts:

--- a) the magnification was set to 400% in the Adobe Acrobat (visible in the
screenshot);
--- b) the resolution of the computer screen was set to 100dpi (this is
important as by default MS Windows - and, possibly other systems - screens are
set to 96dpi -- you have to change your screen resolution in system preferences
to reproduce this; please let me know if you need help doing so).

It is a combination of a) and b) that allows the Adobe Acrobat to render a PDF
page so that rendering of the embedded 400dpi image is "pixel-to-pixel"
(overall scaling factor is 1). This combination for the Adobe Acrobat amounts
to it rendering at 400dpi. Once again:

--- Adobe Acrobat renders bitonal embedded image as bitonal when rendering at
the original image resolution. 

And so does any properly implemented pdf renderer. Please let me know if you
need more examples.


> P.S: Don't demand stuff of people that give you things for free, it's bad
> manners

No demands intended. Just wanted to find out if whoever wrote the buggy update
to the Poppler renderer is interested at all in confirming and fixing the bug
or if I should do it myself (which would be much more time-consuming since it
would be somebody else's code that I would have to work with) and if so what
are the chances of the owner(s) of this open source project accepting the patch
(so that I don't waste my time in vain).

P.S. Frankly, so far the attitude of Mr. Albert Astals Cid toward this bug
report reminds me that of Adobe's when in the early versions of Acrobat they
kept saying that the horrible rendering of Type 3 fonts is "just fine". This
eventually led to possibly millions of people having to print the PDFs on paper
that were simply unreadable on screens. Adobe eventually fixed their renderer,
and so can we, I hope.

P.P.S. While it is true that the developers of the Poppler are doing their work
for free, so also true is the fact that many people write free software that
uses Poppler as it's becoming the #1 PDF lib on Unices. It would be wrong to
say that none of them assume at least some level of adequate maintenance of the
Poppler code.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler-bugs/attachments/20130828/bd97a0d5/attachment.html>