Document viewer (evince) couldn't open pdf when system upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04

Solution 1:

Library path incorrect

Nine years ago on this bug report it was discovered:

installed a version without using the packaging system and it's taking over the ubuntu build and breaking your installation

" libpoppler-glib.so.4 => /usr/local/lib/libpoppler-glib.so.4 (0xb78b0000)"

clean that and it should be working correctly

The solution was to remove:

sudo rm -f /usr/local/lib/libpoppler-glib.so.4

Nine years later and you have a similar problem. Checking LD_LIBRARY_PATH is pointing to a single dir rather than the full path list. There is an incorrect version of libpoppler-cpp.so and libpoppler-glib.so.8 there.

Moving libpopper* to another directory allowed evince to work with the proper dynamic linker searches in /lib and /usr/lib.