Okular is unable to render images from PDFs but printing is fine

[edisav]

This is a bizarre problem that I'm having with Okular, but I'm not sure this is the right forum. If not, please advise.

This happens only with a particular bill from a credit card company. When I download the PDF and open it with Okular, all the data with dates, description, and amounts cannot be seen. This is the important information I'd like to see, but other unimportant information, such as terms and conditions, are just fine. However, everything is visible when I print the document.

The Kubuntu version is Xenial 16.04 LTS, but I do remember having this problem with the previous LTS version before I upgraded to 16.04. Everything was working fine, and one day it just stopped. I didn't perceive any visible changes to the bill formatting.

Am I missing a plug-in or something? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[jlittle]

Sometimes evince will solve this kind of problem. It's the Gnome PDF reader, and installing it can pull down a bunch of Gnome decencies. Might be worth a try. It's not surprising that printing works, the PDF is rendered by a different library.

John Little

[oshunluvr]

I'd use Master PDF rather than a Gnome program, but that's just me. Still though - not a solution. I have no problems with large files and Okular - I even those of 100's of MB - 1200+ pages

First test is to launch Okular in a terminal then open your bill. There might be some useful output.

[edisav]

Hi John,

Evince solved the problem. I just won't bother with Okular anymore.

Thanks!

[jlittle]

Evince solved the problem. I just won't bother with Okular anymore.

Great!

My recollection is vague, but I think I can recall a case where Okular worked but Evince didn't. IIUC both Evince and Okular use "Poppler" for printing, which muon tells me is based on Xpdf. I've had at least one case where Poppler didn't cope, producing nearly blank pages, so Okular and Evince wouldn't print. Firefox is choosy about which PDFs it can handle but in one case could print something I couldn't print otherwise. These cases were some years ago now.

<rant>Philosophically, I dislike PDFs heartily, even though Adobe opened the format. They're attractive to those producing documents because they can control how things appear; I, the reader, don't want to be dictated to. F. ex. I hate reading white background documents on screen, they hurt my eyes, and with PDFs I just have to lump it, or invert the window completely (yay KDE) which is no good for pictures. HTML should be used instead.</rant>