Subject: bug#637: [devuan-dev] bug#637: xpdf crashes the window manager

From: Adam Sampson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2021 01:13:23 +0000

Mark Hindley <[email-masked]> writes:

> Thanks. Notwithstanding this, you should report this issue directly to
> Debian. Devuan uses Debian's xpdf packages directly without
> recompilation.

(I'm the maintainer of xpopple, which is the upstream source for
Debian's xpdf these days.)

The problem reported here is not that xpdf crashes, it's that the window
manager crashes. That shouldn't happen regardless of what client
programs do, so this isn't a fault in xpdf itself.

Are you certain that it's the window manager crashing, and not the X
server? The latter seems more likely -- when you're scrolling the table
of contents, it's not changing any properties of the window (which would
cause the WM to do something), but it is doing lots of X drawing
operations to scroll the list and render new text. It'd be worth having
a look at the X server log after a crash (/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old).

If it's only just started doing this, one change we've made recently in
xpdf is to enable Xft font support by default. You could try setting the
following X resource (with xrdb):

Xpdf*font: fixed

This should make it use a bitmap font for the interface instead, which
will be rendered using X's core font support rather than alpha
blending. If that fixes it, then it could be a problem with your
graphics driver's implementation of the RENDER extension.

Thanks,

-- 
Adam Sampson <[email-masked]>                         <http://offog.org/>