Why is Preview not displaying fonts correctly?

Question

Level 1

8 points

Why is Preview not displaying fonts correctly?

Since the last Snow Leopard upgrade, Preview is not displaying some fonts correctly. I checked to see if the fonts were embedded in the PDF (by resorting to Adobe Acrobat 5... which is not displaying them correctly either) and they are True Type with Windows encoding which as far as I know Preview OS X should be able to handle.
I tried deleting the Preview preferences in User/Library/Prefeerences and restarting but this made no difference. The same PDF works perfectly though on an old iMac that is running OS X Tiger!!!

Intel iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.2), Custom

Posted on Dec 11, 2009 3:15 AM

Reply

Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

32,031 points

Dec 11, 2009 5:20 AM in response to Ironic Bliss

You may have a font problem. Open Font Book (in your Applications folder), select all your fonts (click any font in the font list, then press command-A or choose Edit -> Select All) and then choose File -> Validate Fonts. Trouble fonts will be indicated and can be disabled from within Font Book. You can also choose to remove duplicates, which is also a good idea.

Reply

Answer 2

Ironic Bliss Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 11, 2009 6:01 AM in response to thomas_r.

Well I found a few minor font problems which seem to have cropped up since the last system upgrade, but none of those were the font in question. Also, as I understand it, the whole point of PDF documents is that the fonts are embedded in the document so you do not have to have the fonts installed on your computer to view the PDF properly. I use a lot of special fonts and when I save documents as a PDF I can send them to anyone on the internet and they can usually see everything as it is meant to be.

Reply

Answer 3

Feb 2, 2010 8:33 AM in response to Ironic Bliss

I am also having some issues with preview and some fonts within it.
Our title block that displays our companies logo had a special font attached to it. I loaded it on the MAC for use with Archicad, but whenever we produce pdf's with our title font, the font shows as glyphs. Unless of course I open it on PC's.
I cannot figure out why preview will not show the font correctly if the font was loaded to the MAC and another program reads it fine?

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Reply

Answer 4

Mar 4, 2010 11:31 AM in response to Ironic Bliss

Look in Preview's Preferences
In the PDF tab
Check *Smooth text and line art*

I had unchecked this to get a PDF to render without subpixel cracks and forgot to turn back on! It was driving me nuts, but this was the solution for me.

If that doesn't do it, try rebuilding your font cache, in Terminal:
*atsutil databases -removeUser*

then log out and back in

Reply

Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,148 points

Mar 31, 2010 6:25 AM in response to Linda Barwick

I'm also having font problems with PDFs created out of (I think) PageMaker - I've tried all these fixes and none work.

There are lots of ways that pdfs can get produced that can cause problems for different readers. Try Adobe Reader instead. Best to have it available for cases where Preview doesn't work. They are not identical in their capabilities.

Reply

Answer 6

Mar 30, 2010 11:56 PM in response to Joel Bruner1

I'm also having font problems with PDFs created out of (I think) PageMaker - I've tried all these fixes and none work.

Reply