PDF font bug in Preview

I have seen a similar thing on my MBP that I just upgraded to Leopard. For me, the problem is when I try to use Latex Equation Editor (LEE) or Latexit (either one). First of all, neither of them really works. LEE normally comes up with a nice fancy set of equations when you start it. Now, on Leopard, the text looks horrible and many special characters are missing. And then, once I have started LEE, any TeX document that I look at in Preview is in san serif with missing math characters. The files look fine in Acrobat. It would appear that it is some kind of font caching issue, since after a reboot, preview works fine on the files that it had failed on before. That is, until I fire up LEE or Latexit. I have searched the various forums, but I haven't found a similar problem until now.

I don't know enough about the font system on Macs to know more than that. I did run Font book and discovered that there were many duplicate fonts, at least some of which seemed incomplete. All were in /Library. I disabled the 'partial' fonts, but that didn't fix the problem. So I am at a loss here.

Same problem opening a legal document downloaded from Westlaw. It used the same fonts as in the bad screenshot that Humphreys posted. I opened the file in Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 and it looked right. Then, I opened Font Book, did NOTHING, and opened the file again in Preview and it looked correct. Irritating.

(20" iMac 2.33 GHz Intel, 2GB)

And then it reverted to showing it ugly again. Here's a screenshot of the two images side by side. The one on the right is the Acrobat one which renders properly. The one on the left is the bad Preview one.

http://www.screenshots.cc/view_image/8dcd11609/Picture 1.jpg

Not having a clue what these commands mean, I proceeded slowly but your advice worked. I deleted only the TEMP results. In Terminal, I typed

rm -rf `getconf DARWIN USER_TEMPDIR`

Then, I rebooted, and that seems to have fixed it on both my 20" iMac and my brand new Macbook. At least, so far so good.

Thanks for the help!

Apparently, this is not a permanent fix. You have to keep doing it. Annoying.

Indeed, wiping out the caches is not a permanent solution.

I found a couple of threads in some tex newsgroups that discuss this problem. There doesn't seem to be a resolution. There was some discussion that Latex Equation Editor is no longer being developed, but LaTeXIt, a similar program shows a similar font corruption problem. Fonts are fine in Preview until using LaTeXIt (or Latex Equation Editor), when they get 'corrupted'. By that I mean that documents viewed in Preview often come up sans-serif, regardless of the original font, and often special characters, such as arrows above letters (indicating vectors) disappear. Keynote files that use those characters (from, for example, using LaTeXIt under Tiger) show corruption. Rebooting (and possibly simply logging out and back in) 'cures' the problem, ie, Preview and Keynote are once again happy. During all this, Acrobat is always happy.

This is kind of painful, since I give physics lectures using Keynote, and things like integral and summation signs and vectors and such are kind of nice to have around.

Someone has got to know what is going on!

Yes - I've had the same problem - all files created with pdflatex or pdftex don't seem to work with Preview. This includes files created on other machines - and a lot of documents on physics websites. This is despite the fact that these documents have fonts embedded - so the font set up should not matter.

I've tried all of the ideas suggested for resetting font caches etc - all to no effect. In the end I've had to set up to use Adobe PDF reader as the default to get working again.

This looks like a definite bug in the new version of Preview to me.

I've had a similar problem too. I use texshop with pdftex to create pdf files. I am running leopard on a macbook. As I understand files created pdftex have fonts embedded, although only the subset is embedded. My preview displays fonts correctly without problem, BUT when I print out fonts become sans serify. On the display it looks fine, on the print out its all wrong!! why would that be??

I am still struggling with the same problem. Fonts in preview display OK, BUT would not print. I found that the problem is not only with preview. Printing the PDF file from Adobe Reader, partially solves the problem. At least palatino font is printed correctly, but still lots of annoying stuff: like greek letters not printing, and for some reason section headers printed sans-serify…
Also this happens with downloaded pdfs, presumably not created with latex.

I get a similar effect with Preview.app v.3.0.9 (409). Special Norwegian characters (æøå) in Arial text either show up like inverted question marks (¿) or space. The document was produced by MS Word / LaserWriter 8 H1 8.7.1 / Destiller 3.01 (for Mac) according to document properties. The macs I use for viewing have Tiger 10.4.10 or 11 on them.

Has anyone here reported this bug to Apple?

Ingmar

This is a constant problem for us too (on our new Leopard only machines), any program that uses the OS to display PDFs will keep dropping type.

This means the finder, preview, keynote and mail applications. Our placed PDFs in keynote slides don't show type. In finder windows, the type in pdfs (the icon) is sporadic at best, in mail and entourage the type on pdfs in email is also sporadic. Preview itself is completely hot or miss. But open the same pdf in acrobat and viola, perfect.

Clearing the font caches and restarting is only a temporary fix.

This is an inexcusable bug that makes doing professional design work (the sole reason we have macs) extremely difficult. I wish we had not upgraded any of our computers.

Just a data point.
I use TeXShop and PDFtex and have had no problems viewing or printing!
I am just using the standard fonts.

charlie

Why is this question marked as "answered"? I do not see how to really fix the bug.

I have had the same problem since I purchased my MacBook Pro with Leopard in October. I only use Word and Preview but scientific papers that contain equations are corrupted in Preview, essentially over-written with other fonts (just like the images above). I have tried erasing my user cache and rebuilding it but this only works temporarily. It is a huge problem for me because I must give presentations and publish papers, but I never know when my fonts will be corrupted. Sometimes logging in and out fixes the problem but this can't be the best solution. My acrobat is largely OK as long as I don't save one of the corrupted files in Preview.

This bug is definitely not fixed!