Evince and poppler (the library used to render PDFs) are quite outdated in etch, and fail to display correctly a number of PDF files (including PDFs generated by latex-beamer). There’s a new poppler version (0.5.x, vs 0.4.5 in etch), but it bumps the soname, so it’s a no-go.

Since I was particularly annoyed by this (I’m an evince fan), I looked at the issue, and found that entry in poppler’s changelog for version 0.5.1:

2006-02-16  Albert Astals Cid

        * qt4/src/Makefile.am:
        * qt/Makefile.am:
        * poppler/Makefile.am:
        * glib/Makefile.am: Update soname as we are not really compatible
        anymore with previous releases that had soname 0.0.0

And I thought that maybe, the soname update was not totally justified. I modified the package in experimental (v.0.5.4) to remove the soname bump, and renamed the binary packages so it becomes a drop-in replace for the version in etch.

It works fine for me with the version of evince in etch, and seems to fix at least #369164, #409758, and #410085.

Packages are available here. Of course, this is totally unsupported, and I have not done any careful testing. But it works for me until now, and I’l update this entry if I discover some problems. Also, I don’t plan to maintain this on the long term, so beware of security bugs.

Update : This breaks tetex (see #356079). Arg. I’ll have to use the experimental version…