Your message dated Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:06:00 -0500
with message-id <2700456.Lt9SDvczpP@riemann>
and subject line Re: ghostscript: txtwrite device broken, produces jibberish
has caused the Debian Bug report #1082955,
regarding ghostscript: txtwrite device broken, produces jibberish
to be marked as done.
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--
1082955: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1082955
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Package: ghostscript
Version: 10.04.0~dfsg-1
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected]
Dear Maintainer,
The txtwrite device in the most recent upload of ghostscript is broken;
this causes src:plastex to FTBFS as it uses the device in its test
suite.
The following is a simple reproducer based on a unit test from plastex.
(The necessary test3.pdf is also attached).
/-----
$ cat test3.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
a.b
\end{document}
$ lualatex test3
[...]
Output written on test3.pdf (1 page, 2719 bytes).
### In bookworm
$ gs --version
10.00.0
$ gs -q -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o %stdout% test3.pdf
a.b
### In sid
$ gs --version
10.04.0
$ gs -q -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o %stdout% test3.pdf
X#
-----/
The tool pdftotext from poppler-utils also correctly extracts the text
from the test file.
This problem does not extend to all PDFs; in fact it seems to be
confined to PDFs generated by lualatex while pdflatex is OK.
Unfortanately for modern fonts and UTF-8, users are encouraged to use
lualatex these days, and the plastex test suite does so. As seen below,
lualatex picks different fonts and encodes them differently - that seems
to be what ghostscript is getting wrong.
$ pdffonts test3-lualatex.pdf
name type encoding emb sub
uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- ---
--- ---------
VFSMBO+LMRoman10-Regular CID Type 0C Identity-H yes yes
yes 4 0
$ pdffonts test3-pdftex.pdf
name type encoding emb sub
uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- ---
--- ---------
ZKXRNQ+CMR10 Type 1 Builtin yes yes
yes 4 0
regards
Stuart
test3.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
On Sun, 24 Nov 2024 16:15:01 -0600 Steven Robbins <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> It seems like you may have identified the issue? There's an existing
upstream
> bug report suggesting incomplete support for "CID-Keyed font". I don't know
> what that means, but please take a look at the following bug report and let
me
> know if this matches your issue or not.
Closing, as no further information has been obtained.
-Steve
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