Wrong rendering of PDF files in Okular

Hello! I hope someone can help me with this or direct me to where I can report this “bug”. Basically, I have seen a problem in Okular (and, for a fact, in some other PDF readers), where some files cannot be rendered “properly”, or at least in the most “readable” way. What do I mean by this? Well, let’s show some comparisons:

Default PDF viewer from Linux Mint: https://images2.imgbox.com/bd/8b/qFzQQ3cP_o.png

Okular: https://images2.imgbox.com/35/e0/SiEpq6OO_o.png

Default PDF viewer: https://images2.imgbox.com/6d/44/0Cf4ul3p_o.png

Okular: https://images2.imgbox.com/70/bc/uM6JJmUR_o.png

As you can see clearly, Ganshof’s book is difficult to see (looks even worse on the actual file and not the screencap); while MALLIMACI’s is outright unreadable. I can provide both these files if there’s a need to test this. Files for testing: aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWdhLm56L2ZpbGUvTmlGV0FBSWEjU09xZTgtdmJUSm02YWVETkQyMU1GU3pHcWdabnl1R2tuS2xyX0JsbVA5MA== aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWdhLm56L2ZpbGUva2lrMjFTWUEjd2xYUFlRQXNQYjdwckN1Umdvdk9jVUt1NE1FMFdPUmx2NUdPUlkyOWh2aw== b64. Any help is appreciated, thank you.

You can report bugs to

https://bugs.kde.org

1 Like

Why the base64. Anywho, out of curiosity…I ran this in okular, onlyoffice and libreoffice.

The , by far, both slowest and worst quality: Libreoffice.


Second, Okular.

Best quality and fastest…onlyoffice.

Okular was…ok-ish as far as I can tell.

Hmm, that looks similar to mine in the Default Mint PDF viewer, I wonder what could have changed?

I have no idea. I tested a geometrical circular and…well, it’s pretty obvious.

In onlyoffice and some web browser:

ksnip_20240918-181937
ksnip_20240918-182037

And Okular:
ksnip_20240918-182001

What you see as good quality is just some extra smoothing added on top of bitmap image, the images inside that pdf file are originally of poor quality.

MasterPDF Editor - Without bitmap smoothing:
Screenshot_20240918_185512

MasterPDF Editor - With bitmap smoothing:
Screenshot_20240918_185556

So the problem is that Okular image antialiasing even if enabled is simply broken.