[scribus] windows to linux charset issue for PDF annotation

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 29 May 2020 18:00:42 +0200
JLuc <jluc at no-log.org> dijo:

>It's about a scribus created pdf but this is not strictly related to
>scribus : A friend on windows has proofread and annotated a scribus
>PDF document. When opening it on Ubuntu, some of the notes are OK
>readable, but some other are scrambled and some other seem to be cut
>in the middle of the text.
>
>It could be related to notes having accenctuated or special characters
>as " or « because none of the readable notes has such accenctuated
>characters afaict. I've tried with Evince and Okular.
>
>Do you have an advice on how to access correctly these notes on linux ?
>(Or on how to fix that in the annotation tool on windows ?)

JLuc,

When characters don't appear correctly in a PDF it's usually a font
issue. I'd start by looking at the Properties of the PDF document to
see what fonts are used in it and if they are embedded or not. The best
practice is to embed all fonts with the program that created the PDF,
then make sure that those fonts are installed on the Linux computer
that is being used to view the PDF file.

Once you know which fonts are in the PDF document you might also use
Fontmatrix or other font viewer to see if the fonts actually contain
the characters that you think they do. If the PDF file was created on a
Windows or Mac computer the operating system sometimes makes up a
character for viewing on screen when the character is actually missing
in the font.