Printing of joplin-generated PDFs results in scattered print errors

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Joplin 2.8.8. Fedora 35 (Linux). evince-41.4-1.fc35.x86_64

File > Export all > PDF

(Note, I have to do this to get to a printable state since File > Print crashes Joplin on Linux.)

I used pdfinfo to examine the PDF a bit. It shows nothing amiss. Here's the top header info from that.

Creator:        Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Joplin/2.8.8 Chrome/93.0.4577.82 Electron/14.1.0 Safari/537.36
Producer:       Skia/PDF m93

I then open the PDF via file browser which opens evince. The PDF looks perfectly formatted and normal. I then print the PDF from evince. (Evince is the PDF viewer on most Linuxes.)

The results are formatted as expected, but ... characters are mangled all over the place. Maybe one page will be fine and then all the rest will be screwed up. I can't see a pattern. But this is an example what it looks like (this is a photograph of a printed page; the paper was not perfectly flat):

PXL_20220815_154142390
PXL_20220815_1541423901920×1440 204 KB

I took a look at and printed other PDFs I generated and saved to disk. No problems. The latest of those PDF-successes were generated by Joplin 2.7.15 in May. I couldn't find a more recent example that was still around.

I found a workaround though, thankfully. If I open the generated PDF in a web browser and then print from there, the problem goes away. That suggests either the problem is with evince or Mozilla washes away issues in the PDF itself.

Is anyone else having these kinds of issues? I looked in Joplin's configuration for how PDFs are generated and ... that's a mystery to me. From PDFinfo, it looks like skia is involve. There are a lot of places this issue could reside:

  • Skia
  • Joplin's use of skia
  • The print-driver I am using - but I am only seeing this with Joplin-generated content
  • Evince - but I am only seeing this with RECENT Joplin-generated content

Also, I did open the dev-tools and watched the console through this export process and there are no errors of any sort.

I can supply a trusted person with the PDF if they want to troubleshoot. Or, if anyone can recommend a better way to validate a PDF than pdfinfo? I searched for any issues with evince and didn't find anything.

Thanks. Have a lovely Monday.

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Side note: FILE > PRINT ... crashes Joplin on Fedora 35. That being said, print crashes have been much reported elsewhere.

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