[groff] Something broke embedded fonts in gropdf output (but not grops)

[Jim Avera]

Hello,

Something changed between Ubuntu 16.04 and 17.10 which makes 
locally-installed fonts not render correctly in PDFs generated with 
groff -Tpdf.   However groff -Tps produces correctly-rendering 
postscript (files in devps/ and devpdf/ are identical).   Ubuntu 17.10 
has */groff 1.22.3/* and */ghostscript 9.21/*.   I'm sorry but I don't 
know the earlier version nos.

To rule out a font-installation problem (mostly), I created a script 
which re-installs a font set into a temporary directory and runs tests 
without any local environment variables set, except for GROFF_FONT_PATH 
and GS_FONTPATH, which are set to point only to temporary directories 
generated by the script.  See below.

There are some odd symptoms:

1.  If pdf2ps is run on the "broken" pdf file, the resulting postscript 
renders correctly!  And ps2pdf on _that_ produces a working .pdf file.

That makes me suspect something in gropdf's output confuses ghostscript.

2.  The "gv" viewer, alone, does not exhibit the problem -- it renders 
the pdf correctly.
But /every other/ /renderer/ I've tried (evince, xpdf) AND a physical 
printer render the gropdf output incorrectly:
The locally-defined font is replaced with a weird sans-serif font, but 
with boldness and/or italicness preserved.

(The printer, which also renders incorrectly, is a Brother MFC-9340-CDW 
using a Brother-provided CUPS driver; I assume the driver uses 
ghostscript to convert pdf to an image, but am not certain.  The printer 
does not have native Postscript support.)

Troff is finding it's font description files -- no warning about missing 
fonts occur.  And the desired font names _are_ mentioned inside the 
generated pdf.


I'm really lost here.   I hope I'm not wasting your time...

Attached are the following:

1. grofftest.sh  -  a self-contained script to reproduce the problem.

It contains uuencoded .ttf font files (HP's "Dark Courier" fonts) and 
uses ttf2ufm and afmtodit to generate the other files needed by groff 
and ghostscript.

It runs troff -Tpdf or troff -Tps and saves the intermediate results; 
then runs gropdf or grops with strace, to help see what files they 
access.   Finally, it runs pdf2ps on the output from gropdf, again under 
strace.

All the generated files are left in a newly-created directory 
"/tmp/grtest" (see the script for specifics).

2. Screen shot of evince showing output from "groff -Tpdf" (bad rendering)

3. Screen shot of evince showing output from "groff -Tps" (correct)

4. Screen shot of evince showing result of groff -Tpdf | pdf2ps (correct)


Thanks for any help or suggestions!

-Jim Avera

grofftest.bash
Description: Text document

groffTpdf_evince.png
Description: PNG image

groffTps_evince.png
Description: PNG image

pdf2ps_evince.png
Description: PNG image