wrong letter positioning and font in PDF form

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 and filling out the SS-5 Social Security Administration form. However, some of the letters are wrongly positioned.

Evince 3.28.2-1:

Okular 1.3.3 (Ubuntu version 4:17.12.3-0ubuntu1):

xpdf 3.04-7:

mudpdf 1.12.0:

The built-in PDF reader for Firefox 59.0.2:

The built-in PDF reader for Chromium 65.0.3325.181:

Here is the output of pdffonts:

$ pdffonts ss-5.pdf
name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
IHPIKC+ArialMT                       CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes    824  0
ArialMT                              TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     826  0
Arial-BoldMT                         TrueType          WinAnsi          no  no  no     828  0
CourierStd                           Type 1            WinAnsi          no  no  no     145  0
Helvetica                            Type 1            WinAnsi          no  no  no     197  0
MyriadPro-Regular                    Type 1            WinAnsi          no  no  no     198  0
ZapfDingbats                         Type 1            ZapfDingbats     no  no  no     199  0

I have already installed the ttf-mscorefonts-installer and poppler-data packages.

Here are my questions:

• Can I change the font used for filling in the cells of the form?

  It seems like Evince and xpdf are using a variable-width font when they should be using a monospaced font, and maybe this is causing the positioning problem.

• If I were to file a bug report, should I file it as a poppler issue, a fontconfig issue, or somewhere else?

Update: bug reports:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/1824260

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/1127

• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/753

Edit: The workaround from @xiota is perfectly functional. However, this is still a bug in poppler, because when the PDF viewer substitutes a different font due to the original not being embedded, the spacing in the XFA form should match the substituted font, not the original font. There is a pull request to fix this that is currently in progress. Poppler developer Tobias Deiminger (@haxtibal) described the approach in a different bug report:

The strategy there is, if a font is not embedded, gather and use metrics from the actual substitute font instead of metrics from PDF font descriptor or hardcoded ones.

Answer 1

This issue should be patched in the next version of Ubuntu (21.04). There is also an upstream fontconfig merge request #128 pending.

---

The problem you are observing is caused by incorrect font substitution. On my computer, CourierStd and ZapfDingbats are replaced with Ubuntu. That will obviously not render properly.

To correct this:

• Install fonts-urw-base35. This should correct the Dingbats and most other pdf font substitutions. However, CourierStd substitution is not fixed because it is not in the config files.

• To correct CourierStd, create the file ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/10-pdf-aliases.conf with the following contents:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "/etc/fonts/conf.d/fonts.dtd">
    <fontconfig>
  
    <alias binding="same">
      <family>Courier Std</family>
      <accept>
      <family>Courier</family>
      </accept>
    </alias>
  
    <alias>
      <family>Courier Std</family>
      <default><family>monospace</family></default>
    </alias>
  
    </fontconfig>
  

  Then run fc-cache (may not be necessary).

  You can add other font aliases to the file as needed.

See also:

• PDF font falls back to DejaVu Sans, need a monospace replacement