Using Poppler to turn text in a PDF into paths as it's imported has the annoying side-effect of making the text slightly more bold once it has been converted into paths.

I was going to attach the original PDF file and new SVG file but I get a message saying "The file is too big, maximum allowed size is 256 KiB."

Poppler is a great feature, but making text bold seems like an unnecessary distortion. Can this be fixed?

Maybe the file can be uploaded to a sharing site and linked.

Might just be the font is being replaced by something close (or, is this seen on all fonts, even those resident on the machine?).

Likely your system has a recent version of freetype (>= 2.5.0) installed (or you might use the 64bit Windows packages of Inkscape 0.91pre which include freetype 2.5.3). Freetype >= 2.5.0 uses the new Adobe CFF engine driver by default. This may result in such differences (small type is rendered darker). Poppler's command line tool 'pdftocairo' is equally affected.

Not an Inkscape bug AFAICT: the change in freetype - switch to the new CFF engine contributed by Adobe - was intentional. Whether and/or which upstream library needs to adjust to the freetype changes (or offer runtime options to control which engine is used by clients) I can't tell, could be poppler, or cairo.

• Issue reproduced on OS X 10.7.5 with 'default' freetype 2.5.4, pdftocairo from poppler 0.29, Inkscape 0.48.5 as well as Inkscape 0.91+devel r13803.
• The effect of which CFF engine is used in freetype was confirmed by recompiling freetype 2.5.4 with the old CFF engine enabled (and thus used by default, as described in 'ftcffdrv.h'): text gets outlined as expected, even at small sizes - both with Inkscape's import via poppler and with 'pdftocairo -svg' on the command line.