GIMP Version: 2.8.14
Operating System: Mac OS
OS Version: 10.10.4
GIMP Experience: Intermediate Level

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I have previously used the program R to generate PDFs of plots and histograms. R allows the user to specify the axes with labels and numers at specific tick marks. When I import a set of freshly generated PDFs, all the text and numbers along the axes look like, for lack of a better term, "escape character boxes". This means that every character is replaced with a box that outlines where the character is on the original PDF. I have seen this kind of thing when escape characters are in a place where they should not be.

I am able to import a PDF from another source with no problems. Please understand, this is not a problem with resolution. I have used GIMP to prepare images for publication in scientific journals many times and have never seen this issue before.

Is there some way to investigate the information about the PDFs? Or (hopefully) is this a known issue with a fix?

Thanks in advance for any help.

The Gimp plugin that loads PDF files actually just uses the Poppler software library to read the file and interpret the PDF contents and instructions into rasterized layers.
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_%28software%29
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

So, as a first step, perhaps you could check whether some of the other software packages which also use Poppler (eg. InkScape, LibreOffice, Okular, Evince, etc.) display these PDFs correctly or not.