PDF font bug in Preview

I've put Leopard on all 9 of my macs, and I love it.

On one of them (unfortunately the macbook pro that I use all the time), I'm having a nasty bug with PDFKit.

When I open a PDF file that I made in pdflatex in Preview, sometimes it looks fine, but sometimes the fonts are all wrong and sans-serif-y. In many occasions, I an switch back and forth between the good fonts and the bad fonts JUST BY SWITCHING AWAY FROM PREVIEW AND SWITCHING BACK.

bad:

http://www.screenshots.cc/view_image/9eeb21311/ThisLooksAwful.png

good:

http://www.screenshots.cc/view_image/c83d91304/ThisLooksGreat.png

Has anyone seen anything like this? The bad fonts propagate themselves all the way to a printed page.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 2, 2007 5:24 AM

30 replies

jpeeters

Level 1

0 points

Feb 25, 2008 4:19 PM in response to sinistrum

I have the same issues as you do. PDF's look fine on screen, but are unreadable when printed: text is missing, font issues, ... Did the clean cache trick solved (temporary) your issues?

xaipete

Level 1

24 points

Mar 31, 2008 8:33 AM in response to Grigori Humphreys

Ran:

rm -rf `getconf DARWIN USER_CACHEDIR

in terminal mode.

Rebooted and problem is fixed. Thanks.

Mar 31, 2008 4:47 PM in response to Grigori Humphreys

I have 4 of our users that have upgraded and this seems to be happening to us too. When we open the PDF file it is fine. I have tried cleaning out the font caches and had no luck.

mcssales

Level 1

0 points

Mar 31, 2008 10:55 PM in response to opal

Everybody, report preview problems to apple at:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

My biggest problem in preview 4.0 is it freezes while trying to view large images across four apple LCD's. Sometimes I see a gray screen.

sam_a

Level 1

10 points

May 5, 2008 11:35 AM in response to wolbert

After searching on the web for a while I found this tip which seems to get rid of the font problem without rebooting.

All you need to do is to kill the process linked with the ATSServer (Apple Type Solution server). In a terminal, the command would look like this:

*killall -u yourusernamehere ATSServer*

The ATSServer is relaunched right away.

You won't need to log out but it's better to close applications such as Word or TeXshop before otherwise you get even weirder thing.

See also
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070627212154574
http://daringfireball.net/2005/03/font_caches

Jun 9, 2008 8:53 AM in response to sam_a

Thanks sam_a -- you're a life-saver! I would occasionally have problems where PDFs would display with the wrong characters or font, or with nothing at all. Previously the only solution was to restart, but quitting Preview (or Skim) and using your one line terminal command fixes the problem. This has saved me a lot of hassle until Apple gets around to fixing this long-standing bug.

Jun 12, 2008 8:32 AM in response to sam_a

Men you are a star! This tip works perfect.

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Jun 12, 2008 9:05 AM in response to Grigori Humphreys

Bear in mind that the OS's PDF renderer is several years behind the standard, so fancy features that may fly in Acrobat will often fail to render at all in Preview. Whether or not that's the problem here, I have no idea, but you usually have to dumb-down your PDFs for the 1.4 spec if you want it to look decent.

Jun 17, 2008 9:41 PM in response to Grigori Humphreys

Anyone having a problem creating pdf's with the print function in Preview?

Text as it appears in Preview: http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/4527/picture1xr4.png
And as it appears in the PDF: http://img377.imageshack.us/img377/8873/picture2hc4.png

Message was edited by: Adam Liss

Sep 10, 2008 2:08 PM in response to sam_a

Thank god! I'm a math professor and this bug has been my nemesis. Thanks so much for the fix!

sorame

Level 1

0 points

Sep 17, 2008 10:58 AM in response to Grigori Humphreys

See my post

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1715154&tstart=0

I didn't find this thread before I posted. Sorry.

bertab

Level 1

4 points

Sep 30, 2008 9:21 AM in response to Chris BR

Same here, I use pdflatex and things were working fine for the 8 months that I have had my computer. But all of sudden yesterday all the documents that have been created with Latex (mostly all in my field) started to display funny fonts in Preview. I have tried all the tricks suggested on this thread with no success, so I finally decided to use acrobat (which I didn't want to, I like preview and I like zooming which my trackpad!!..).

I will keep an eye on this thread to see if some comes with a solution. I agree on that this looks like a bug in Preview...

TildeBee

Level 7

31,923 points

Sep 30, 2008 10:38 AM in response to bertab

bertab --
Welcome to Apple Discussions!
See this other thread on this subject.
It's kinda long, but it really has great info on this problem.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8148645#8148645

Hope this helps.

Message was edited by: ~Bee

bertab

Level 1

4 points

Sep 30, 2008 1:45 PM in response to TildeBee

Thanks Bee!!

So it seems that what I am experiencing is juts a bug in 10.5.5...
Hope that's actually the case and it gets fixed with 10.5.6 soon..

TildeBee

Level 7

31,923 points

Sep 30, 2008 2:25 PM in response to bertab

You're most welcome, bertab.
That thread really blew me away.
We are a user-to-user support group,
and sometimes the depth of the knowledge and experience
of our helpers here really is stunning.

All the best.

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PDF font bug in Preview