Hello, About Poppler, I have a packaging suggestion which may affect Ubuntu installer code as well.
First some background: In order to render CJK fonts in PDF files, Poppler needs the package "poppler-data" to be installed. If "poppler-data" isn't installed, any CJK text in a document is invisible. It is stated in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/language- selector/+bug/893920 that "poppler-data" shouldn't be a regular (mandatory) dependency because "poppler-data" is too big to fit on an Ubuntu install CD. An intended solution has been made (documented in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/language- selector/+bug/893920 ) by modifying "language-selector", starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, to install poppler-data unconditionally. There are some cases in which I think this intended solution might not work: A. I don't know much about language-selector, so I suppose there may be cases when language-selector doesn't run, either on upgrade from a version of Ubuntu prior to 12.04, or on a new install of 12.04 or higher. B. As I recall, once the OS (12.04 or higher) is installed, a notification icon prompts the user to run "language-selector", but the user may ignore this notification. Until language-selector is run, poppler-data doesn't get automatically installed. C. Someone may un-install poppler-data, either accidentally or on purpose, (if a PDF reader was un-installed as part of this, then the same or a different PDF reader may then be re-installed without poppler-data,) then try to view a PDF file that contains CJK fonts. My idea is ... ... to make "poppler-data" a Recommended dependency of Poppler, and that certain use cases will be as follows: 1. CD installs will enable the apt-get flag "--no-install- recommends", so that APT won't try to install poppler-data from the CD, since poppler-data won't be on the CD. 2. The existing installer has a prompt similar to "Do you want to update all software to the latest versions via the Internet?". When this is selected by the user and packages are being downloaded, "--no-install-recommends" can be disabled (possibly letting the user override this in case they are very low on disk space), so that poppler-data will be downloaded and installed. 3. DVD installs can disable "--no-install-recommends", and have poppler-data on the DVD. Poppler-data will be installed unconditionally from the DVD, without the user being prompted, without network access being needed, and without requiring the user to run "language-selector" from the desktop notification. 4. The "--no-install-recommends" flag can be disabled by default in the GUI frontends to APT (it may be already), so that in case C above, poppler-data will automatically get re-installed along with any PDF reader that uses poppler-data, unless the user has enabled this flag. As stated in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/197537/commen ts/7 : (The bug summary is "Can't read PDF file with CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) text".) "The fix should be somewhere in the poppler, it's not applicatin task to care about cidToUnicode mask." ... so I am suggesting that poppler-data be made a dependency of Poppler, not of a specific PDF-reading application. I hope that labeling certain dependencies as Recommended, and adjusting the "--no-install-recommends" strategy as suggested, may be helpful in cases other than poppler-data, for packages that users would generally want to have but that don't fit on an install CD. The issue of invisible "CJK" fonts can affect PDF documents that contain only Latin characters but were produced by software that is set up for CJK speakers. So the issue can affect non-CJK-speaking users. Thanks in advance for comment. -dg1727 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss