I am using okular to view pdf files. However I experience that the font rendering is a lot worse than kde3/kpdf and especially compared to AR it looks horrible. It is not a matter of the fonts, I can even use high quality commercial fonts.

I tried to write a bug reports, but the okular guys refuse to accept any bug stating that their font rendering is buggy.

Is there anything I can do to get better results?

BTW: I would add attachments with pictures showing the problem, but this forum does not seem to allow attachments...

EDIT:
Compare these two
http://www.matthiaspospiech.de/download/temp/okular.png
http://www.matthiaspospiech.de/download/temp/AR8.png

It is clear to see thath the greyscale of the fonts is variing in okular but constant in AR. Also some letters seem to be misplaced in okular. This makes the whole view look very busy.

If you want to show a picture, maybe you can upload it somewhere else and then use the link or image tag to include it in your post.

What version of poppler do you have and what font hinting settings are you using?

tageorgiou wrote:What version of poppler do you have and what font hinting settings are you using?

Version: 0.8.2-1.3

which is the one shipped with Suse 11.0

Could you provide a link to the PDF in question please? it makes diagnosis so much easier

bcooksley wrote:Could you provide a link to the PDF in question please? it makes diagnosis so much easier

http://www.latex-project.org/guides/clsguide.pdf

Its part of the official LaTeX Dokumentation.

Similar problem however occur with every document that I create using LaTeX. (I hardly view other pdf files)

Yes i get that same rendering you got. I am definitely no expert in these matters but does Latex embed the fonts? i am sure i have seen far prettier ( even in the text ) PDF's in Okular.

bcooksley wrote:Yes i get that same rendering you got. I am definitely no expert in these matters but does Latex embed the fonts? i am sure i have seen far prettier ( even in the text ) PDF's in Okular.

Yes it does embed the fonts. You can check that by viewing the properties.

I don't have a way to check it, but I think this problem was also present in kpdf etc.

Btw, here is a screenshot: http://www.walledgardennearghat.com/snapshot1.png . Look how rigidity the letters look in okular than in acrobat (everything super smooth and anti-aliased).

EDIT: wait for the link - apparently photobucket wants to resize and compress everything

pospiech wrote:I tried to write a bug reports, but the okular guys refuse to accept any bug stating that their font rendering is buggy.

The font rendering is done by poppler, so it's no surprise that they reject it - since it's not really "their" font rendering. I would try another poppler-based pdf viewer, and if the results are the same, I'd bug the poppler devs.

And here's my screenshot of KPDF with Poppler 0.10.0:

pospiech wrote:I tried to write a bug reports, but the okular guys refuse to accept any bug stating that their font rendering is buggy.

This needs a better explanations (that is added in each bug report like that, generally): we did not "refuse" bug reports, but we simply cannot track bugs of the Poppler library in KDE's bug tracking system.
This is why you are asked to report (if possible) your problem to the Poppler bug tracking system, https://bugs.freedesktop.org ("poppler" product).
This can apparently looks "unpolite", but really, tracking Poppler bugs in different bug tracking system is simply a mess (not keeping into account that they can be tracked better there).
Also note that this talk applies also to all the external libraries Okular uses for the document it supports: Poppler for PDF files, libspectre for PostScript, DjVuLibre for DjVu, libchm fot CHM, etc.