Garbled / distorted fonts during PDF to image conversion on recent versions

[Jon Wu <jo...@wuservices.com>]

Hi,

Can you help me figure out why some (especially recent) versions of PDFBox
aren't rendering text nicely?

I'm running PDFBox in a web server environment to rasterize PDFs with text
in them. However, I've found that in recent versions, I end up getting
garbled text using the same code.

Here you can see that this big cursive F has a weird break in it in the
middle and all the curves aren't smooth which is really obvious when you
compare this bad image (1.8.3) with the PDF or a good one (1.6.0).

[image: Inline image 1]

Here's what it's supposed to look like:

[image: Inline image 2]

What's weird is that I don't get the bad image when I use pdfbox-app.jar on
the PDF - it's only with my code.

Good versions:
1.6.0 (I'm on this now)
1.7.0-SNAPSHOT from approx 10/24/11
1.8.0-20130225.201137-98

Bad versions:
1.7.1
1.8.0-SNAPSHOT from approx 3/1/13
1.8.3
and many others in between

I ended up downgrading to 1.6.0 because I had some issues with transparency
on some of the good snapshots that were working, but I think the
transparency issues are resolved on 1.8.3.

Any idea what could cause this?

Thanks!
Jon