[evince] printing pdfs adds weird spaces between some characters

[John McPherson <john mcpherson opalle com>]

Hi,

(using Ubuntu 13.04, evince 3.6.1-1ubuntu3)

when I print a pdf document from evince, I get extra horizontal spaces
in the middle of sentences - sometimes between words, and sometimes
splitting a word into 2. If I print the pdf from the command line with
lpr, this doesn't happen.

The pdf-formatted data in CUPS's spool folder is different, depending on
whether I use evince or lpr.
'pdfinfo' on the evince print data says "Creator: cairo 1.12.14
(http://cairographics.org)". The pdf file in the print spool looks fine
with ghostscript and evince, (ie no extra horizontal space), but adds
the spaces when printed (even if I now use lpr to print this generated pdf).

I used the 'pdftosrc' program (part of pdftex) to examine the stream
data inside the PDF, and every sentence of the document that had extra
horizontal space turns out to have an embedded newline inside the text
atoms in the stream. IE:

$ grep -m2 -A1 '\\$' x.3
[(The Univ)-6(er)3(s)-4(i)-4(t)-8(y)11( of)-9( W)-3(es)-4(tern Aus)-4(tra\
li)-5(a )]TJ
--
[(Tit)4(le )-9(\()3(Mr)-4(, M)-3(s, Mr)-11(s, Dr etc)-7(\):)-5( )-9437(Fa\
m)5(il)-16(y)15( )-8(Nam)-5(e:)-7( )]TJ

which corresponds to lines printed in the document that look like
   "The University of Western Austra    lia"
and
 "Title (Mr, Ms, Mrs, Dr etc):       Fa   mily Name:"

This may be a bug in the firmware of our Fuji Xerox (ie maybe it's doing
the wrong thing with embedded newline characters), but older versions of
evince were fine, and I don't think we can modify the printer firmware...

This may be a cairo bug instead of an evince bug - I had a quick look
through the evince source but couldn't figure out how layout for
printing happens.

Any thoughts/help?

thanks
John