#41 PDF backgrounds don't work with most recent GTK

[Denis Auroux]

I've received reports of PDF backgrounds failing to load properly with the most recent versions of some distributions (ArchLinux, Gentoo): the background stays gray. Tyler Lawson has diagnosed the problem as an issue with GTK2 settings, which prevents gdk-pixbuf from being able to correctly load PPM files. He suggests recompiling GTK2 with the proper settings. I'd encourage anyone concerned to file a bug-report with their distribution's GTK2 package maintainers.

I'll be working on a fix on the xournal side.
Denis

------------- e-mail from Tyler Lawson -----------

I ran across an issue affecting Xournal's ability to annotate PDF files
recently, and thought I would inform you to perhaps save you some work.
I'm running Arch Linux with gtk2-2.14.7 and this problem may start popping
up in more mainstream distributions shortly.

The issue is that ppm files cannot be loaded. gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file()
ultimately loads the file into memory and passes it to gio to determine
the mime-type; however, the header for a ppm is so rudimentary that gio
can't determine the type without knowing the file extension, and returns
application/octet-stream. This is ironic behavior when you started by
passing the filename to gdk.

You can disable this behaviour by recompiling gtk2 without the line
#define GDK_PIXBUF_USE_GIO_MIME 1
in the "configure" script; this is the quickest fix that I know, since
other fixes would seem to require either changing gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file
to pass the filename or changing gio's logic for detecting pixmaps.

I'll submit a bug about this, but I thought I would let you know in case
someone else asks or you want to implement a workaround (like converting
the ppms to another format).

Tyler Lawson

[Denis Auroux]

Proposed patch:

diff ~/prog/xournal-0.4.2.1/src/xo-file.c ./xo-file.c
990c990,1001
< pixbuf = gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file(ppm_name, NULL);
---
> { // workaround for PPM loading issue in recent GTK
> gchar *buf;
> gsize count;
> GdkPixbufLoader *loader = gdk_pixbuf_loader_new_with_type("pnm", NULL);
> if (loader!=NULL && g_file_get_contents(ppm_name, &buf, &count, NULL))
> {
> gdk_pixbuf_loader_write(loader, buf, count, NULL);
> pixbuf = gdk_pixbuf_loader_get_pixbuf(loader);
> gdk_pixbuf_loader_close(loader, NULL);
> g_free(buf);
> }
> }

I'd appreciate any reports from people affected by the issue about whether this solved things without having to recompile GTK.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

The patch did indeed fix the issue without having to recompile GTK (running Arch Linux). Thanks!

[Robert Buchholz]

There has been more positive feedback about the patch in the Gentoo bugtracker. auroux, will you roll a new release once this is committed?

[Denis Auroux]

Eventually yes there'll be a new release, but not right now. The next few weeks are really hectic for me, and I won't have time to make a clean package. In the short term it's probably better if you work on getting Gentoo (and any other affected distribution) to re-release the package with the patch, without waiting for me to make it official.

Denis

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Proposed patch worked for me. Many thanks, now I can comment thesis works with ease again.

Jari

[Nobody/Anonymous]

I can confirm, that the proposed patch also worked for me.
Arch Linux, x86_64.

Thank you very much.

Tom

[rudiw]

Thanks for the patch. I came across this problem today after a Gentoo update over the weekend. Gentoo users need to xournal-0.4.2.1-r1 which hasn't made it into the stable branch yet (put "app-text/xournal ~x86" in /usr/portage/package.keywords for the time being). This works for me with the current stable gtk+-2.14.7-r2 .

[Nobody/Anonymous]

This issue is not fixed for me.

I am running xournal 0.4.2.1 with GTK 2.14.7 and xpdf 3.02 (comes with pdftoppm). When I try to load a PDF to annotate it, the background does not get loaded (but I still see the lined paper background).

When running xournal from the command line, I don't see any debug output, other than a standard GTK warning message:
Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated

[Denis Auroux]

> This issue is not fixed for me.

Have you incorporated the patch proposed below to xo-file.c (in the bottom-most comment), or recompiled gtk2 without the #define mentioned above? Which distribution are you using?

Denis

[Nobody/Anonymous]

From rudiw's comment I inferred that 0.4.2.1 already had the patch incorporated into it. I just tried the patch to xo-file.c and it does indeed fix the issue. Sorry about the noise auroux.

And if you still care about this, I am using crux. Xournal is not offered as a package in crux; I had to write my own.

[Denis Auroux]

Release 0.4.5 should fix this problem (it doesn't rely on pdftoppm anymore).
Denis