Subject: Re: bug#43815: emacs-pdf-tools often doesn't display text

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2020 22:48:30 +0200

On Mon, 5 Oct 2020 at 19:29, Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > How do you produce these private PDFs?
>
> I don't know, these are PDFs I receive over emails.
> I suspect they are generated by some *Office processor.

Well, what happens with other PDF readers (MuPDF, etc.)?

>From my experience, these kinds of PDFs are badly generated and
contain unexpected content; some readers ignore it, some other ones
are unhappy.  For example, I remember a completely different rendering
of the same PDF depending on MuPDF vs Evince vs Xpdf, and the PDF was
generated by Mac tools.

I am reading really large PDFs with emacs-pdf-tools (PhD thesis or
scientific books) and until now I have never had an issue.  And I am
also reading PDFs with "complex" rendering such as scientific articles
(multicolumns, figures, fonts, etc.) without any issue.

Without any backtrace, warning or error message, it is hard to tell if
it comes from emacs-pdf-tools and (more probably) your PDFs. :-)

All the best,
simon