The PDF that I tried to read has sanskrit verses rendered intelligibilly.
Like this:
However, that should not occur.
Are there fonts I can install to make them legibile?
There is an AUR package that may be helpful, if you have not tried it yet.
paru -Si sanskrit-fonts
Repository : aur
Name : sanskrit-fonts
Version : r33.15a2dd4-1
Description : Various unicode fonts for Sanskrit (Scripts: Devanagari, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya). Fonts include: Siddhanta, Chandas,
Uttara, Sanskrit2003, Noto Sans Devanagari.
URL : http://github.com/indic-transliteration/sanskrit-fonts
AUR URL : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sanskrit-fonts
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Didn’t work out. Still showing me illegible lines.
Too bad, sorry I was not able to be more helpful.
Try ttf-indic-otf
Edit:
Just a sanity check, you need to close and open that specific PDF for the updated fonts to be read.
Also, now that I think of it, aren’t PDF supposed to be readable without requiring specific fonts? I’m not super sure about this, could someone confirm?
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Depends, you can embed specific fonts, but some can use system fonts or even svg / images instead of font glyphs
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It is very likely it’s a broken PDF. Does it look properly on other systems, like on your phone?
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Not a problem.
It’s still illeligible.
I suggest you first check which fonts the PDF is actually using. That can tell what is missing on your PC.
The poppler package provides a tool pdffonts which tells you the fonts used in a given PDF document.
Example:
# pdffonts Teledat_USB_2ab.pdf
name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
Tele-Grotesk-Halb Type 1C Custom yes no yes 378 0
MEBCMG+Tele-Antiqua Type 1C Custom yes yes yes 381 0
Tele-Grotesk-Fett Type 1C Custom yes no yes 399 0
Tele-Grotesk-Norm Type 1C Custom yes no yes 397 0
TeleTasten Type 1C WinAnsi yes no no 401 0
Helvetica-Bold Type 1 WinAnsi no no no 259 0
HelveticaNeue-Light Type 1 WinAnsi no no no 263 0
The column “emb” tells you if a font is embedded in the PDF or loaded from your system.
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As @Kresimir told, the pdf you are using is definitely broken or there is some problem with it.
The image you provided is showing the following text:
You can clearly see that nothing can be known what is written there. There might be mismatch in character encoding supported by the reader and writer applications.
IMHO, there are two possibilities
- The font is embedded in the PDF. Then it should just work.
- The font is not embedded. Then you need the font installed on your system.
As @mbod showed pdffonts will tell.
You’re missing out the most likely possibility:
The PDF file is broken and will never show correctly.
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This could be, of course. Would be possibility 3.
I guess pdffonts would shout if the pdf were broken. But for checking pdfinfo might be best.
Downloading some of the fonts required didn’t make the pdf more legibile. Seems the pdf is broken.
Did you try running pdfinfo and pdffonts?
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Yes
Do you want to share what the outcome was?
Output of pdfinfo:
Title: 1-Inner Title.pmd
Author: TTD Publications
Creator: PageMaker 7.0
Producer: Adobe Acrobat 8.0
CreationDate: Sat Jul 21 15:56:53 2018 IST
ModDate: Sat Jul 21 15:56:53 2018 IST
Custom Metadata: no
Metadata Stream: yes
Tagged: no
UserProperties: no
Suspects: no
Form: none
JavaScript: no
Pages: 533
Encrypted: no
Page size: 612 x 792 pts (letter)
Page rot: 0
File size: 1754696 bytes
Optimized: yes
PDF version: 1.6
Output of pdffonts:
name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
GKIMPN+NeoNatrajMedium Type 1C Custom yes yes yes 2403 0
GKINDN+NeoNatrajBold Type 1C Custom yes yes yes 2404 0
GKINGN+NeoGaneshBold Type 1C Custom yes yes yes 2414 0
GKININ+NeoYogeshMedium Type 1C Custom yes yes yes 2415 0
GKINLN+NeoNatrajLight Type 1C Custom yes yes yes 2416 0
GKINMO+BookAntiqua-Bold TrueType WinAnsi yes yes no 1105 0
GKINOA+BookAntiqua-Italic TrueType WinAnsi yes yes no 1104 0
GKINOC+Calibri TrueType WinAnsi yes yes no 1106 0
GKINPD+BookAntiqua TrueType WinAnsi yes yes no 1107 0
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1109 0
TimesNewRomanPSMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1110 0
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1111 0
TimesNewRomanPSMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1117 0
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1118 0
ArialUnicodeMS TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1114 0
Calibri TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1120 0
BookAntiqua-Bold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1122 0
TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1123 0
DV-TTYogeshBold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1130 0
DV-TTYogeshNormal TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1128 0
TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1131 0
FNTSBS+Wingdings-Regular CID TrueType Identity-H yes yes yes 1135 0
ArialMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1134 0
Mangal TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1136 0
Gautami TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1137 0
FNTSBS+Mangal CID TrueType Identity-H yes yes yes 1140 0
DV-TTYogeshBold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1147 0
TL-TTHemalatha-Bold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1148 0
TimesNewRomanPSMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1142 0
DV-TTYogeshNormal TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1144 0
TL-TTHemalatha-Normal TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1145 0
DV-TTYogeshBold TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1151 0
DV-TTYogeshNormal TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1152 0
DV1-TTYogeshNormal TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1154 0
TimesNewRomanPSMT TrueType WinAnsi no no no 1158 0
I removed many of the fonts I installed previous specifically for this file because, it did not make it more legibile than what it previously was. So, those fonts won’t be displayed here.
So the output of both commands suggest that the PDF is not corrupted in any way.
My understanding: All fonts that are shown as not embeded must be available on your system in order to be shown correctly when viewing the pdf document. If a font is not available on your system the pdf viewer tries to subtitute by a suitable (whatever suitable does mean) font. This could lead to rubbish here as things are in देवनागरी
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