Blank Pages on Preview

Adobe has the ability without royalty penalty and code disruption to keep Acrobat Reader far more PDF compatible than Apple's aging PDF support in Preview. There have been many posts here over the years about PDFs that Preview does not handle, but were handled correctly when opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Apple would be foolish to make any alleged claims about Preview being PDF omnivorous when it fails to handle some PDF content correctly and completely ignores Adobe's Acrobat JavaScript (AcroJS) controls used with PDF forms.

I have a PDF here that I augmented with Acrobat JavaScript that triggers the opened PDF to throw a file expiration dialog after a given date and close. Adobe Acrobat Reader honors that code and Preview completely ignores it.

If opening that PDF, where pages go missing, in the current Adobe Acrobat Reader application, and no pages disappear, then it is Preview lacking modern PDF handling features. If the same PDF behaves badly in Adobe Acrobat Reader, it is the PDF that has the problem.

Tan_You wrote:

Hi all,

I am having this problem of viewing the PDF file on Preview. When I open it and view the pages for the first time, they appear fine. However, when I change the pages and go back to the already viewed pages, all the content disappears, ending up with blank white page. The MacBook software is up to date. Can anybody help with it?

Thanks

Try a true PDF editor/reader and compare your results. Report back your findings.

there are many, here are a few examples:

Acrobat Reader / Adobe Acrobat DC

https://get.adobe.com/reader/

PDFpen / Nitro

https://pdfpen.com/pdfpen/

pdfExpert

https://pdfexpert.com/

Master PDF Editor

https://code-industry.net/get-masterpdfeditor/

Foxit Reader / Editor

https://www.foxit.com/

Wondershare PDFelement

https://pdf.wondershare.com/

I'm having the same issues for a while back now, running Sonoma 14.4.1 on a MacBook Air M1.

Using Preview as a very convenient way to piece different PDF documents or pages together, as I have done many times in the past without issues.

For some reason, having different dpi or size values seems to trigger this effect as certain pages shows up just fine but others don't (that displays properly in Preview separately). Other users on different platforms (Windows, Adobe PDF Reader, etc.) could still see these combined PDFs properly.

However, this issue seems to have gotten worse with the update from MacOS Ventura to Sonoma. Today I opened a larger PDF file (200 pages, 50 Mb) that only includes 2 web links, the rest is flattened with a consistent dpi/size, and as soon as you begin scrolling or zooming in, it all turns blank in Preview.

Even on iOS (17.4.1) the same thing happens. So it is a widespread issue with Apple on handling PDF files on both platforms... Feedback already submitted.

I'm not the OP, but I also have this problem. Taking @leroydouglas's suggestion, I did open my PDF in Nitro. All pages appeared and printed correctly in Nitro. I saved a new copy of the pdf from Nitro and opened the original file and the new copy in Preview. Both files exhibited the "content missing" behavior described by @Tan_You. I have also tested opening the PDF on the same machine, using a different account (content disappeared), and on a totally different machine (content also disappeared). I am using an M1 Mac Mini, Sonoma 10.14.1, Preview 11.0.

Yes, I agree with you. The purpose of my post was to let others know that I am having the issue as well, and the process I used to determine the issue is with Preview. I have submitted a bug report to Apple and hope they will address the issue sometime in the future. Apple has been claiming that Preview is all we need to work with PDFs, but this bug demonstrates that this is not the case.

Interestingly, the bug reporting process has options for all the standard applications EXCEPT for Preview.

John Endahl wrote:

Apple has been claiming that Preview is all we need to work with PDFs

I never read that disclaimer anywhere...maybe you can provide a ref link to that statement?

ref: Preview User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

View PDFs and images in Preview on Mac - Apple Support

For your feedback/bug report: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html