Hi, my 13” 1.1 Ghz intel macbook air is ditching page content in my pdf’s when I edit them in Preview – replacing my work with blank white pages. Started a couple of weeks ago. I’ve wasted a lot of time on it to no avail. I’m a pensioner, doing unpaid work, so no way I can use Acrobat pro.
I’m on Ventura 13.6.7
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.6
What type of edits are you doing to the pdf?
Preview is not exactly a pdf editor - you cannot edit the text in a pdf, for example.
You can add annotations (text, lines, arrows, circles, etc, as well as notes) and it usually works fine.
I use it almost daily in this way, and I can tell you that the behavior you describe is not normal.
Try starting your mac in Safe Mode, and doing one of the edits that you would normally do. Does it still cause the blank page problem?
If the problem goes away in Safe Mode it is a sure sign that some third party software modification on your system is causing a conflict with the way the system is handling pdf.
Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.
What type of edits are you doing to the pdf?
Preview is not exactly a pdf editor - you cannot edit the text in a pdf, for example.
You can add annotations (text, lines, arrows, circles, etc, as well as notes) and it usually works fine.
I use it almost daily in this way, and I can tell you that the behavior you describe is not normal.
Try starting your mac in Safe Mode, and doing one of the edits that you would normally do. Does it still cause the blank page problem?
If the problem goes away in Safe Mode it is a sure sign that some third party software modification on your system is causing a conflict with the way the system is handling pdf.
Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.
Hi old Toad, yes, I did a print-to-pdf from Preview, and this corrected the mysterious all-fall-down effect which had just appeared. Afik a 900-page file is a bit too much of a mouthful for GC, but it seems to have coped with the 15-page version. At the moment Acrobat, Preview and GC are all showing fifteen pages with none white. Computer still awfully slow, so picture editing is very slow and frustrating...
Perhaps I should have another go at the ‘Safe mode’ ? What am I to expect that this will achieve if I can get there?
Once I’m done I save it as a pdf
Are you saving it directly as a PDF or are you doing a Print to PDF? If it's the former try the latter.
Antivirus software: Apple and Sophos
You should uninstall Sophos. All it is doing is waste system resources for no benefit.
Read up on keeping your mac secure: Effective defenses against malware and other threats
Graphic Converter can save as a PDF or print to PDF. If you're saving to PDF try printing to PDF and see if that helps the problem.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I don't know why it is not working correctly.
Maybe it would help if you were to break that long catalog into smaller chunks, say 100 pages at a time.
Not that it should not work with the full document, but it may actually be faster.
A pdf composed of scanned pictures tends to be a very large file. Perhaps there is some error that occurs due to low memory conditions.
Where are you saving the file?
When you save a file, you save to a specific location in your drive, so at the very least you should be able to navigate to that folder and find it. You should of course be able to find it using search.
If a search fails to find a file that you know it exists, there could be a problem with Spotlight.
The default remedy is to reset the Spotlight index:
Go to System Settings->Siri & Spotlight; click Spotligh Privacy; drag the whole drive to the box.
Then close this window, close System Settings; open System Settings again, select the drive in the Privcy Box and press "-".
This forces Spotlight to reindex the whole drive again.
For some people (me included) there was at times a problem in that Spotlight worked fine if searching "This Mac", but could not find anything if you selected a specific folder - even when one is staring at a file right there.
This too can be fixed. Let us know if the procedure above helped or not, and if the search problems are overall or only when searching within a folder.
Anthony Jackson3 wrote:
Not so easy nowadays! There is, afaik, no icon for the ‘whole drive’? So I dragged the Desktop. No ‘-‘. No obvious window to close, but I think I must have. I can cancel, but not ‘close’ the Sysstem settings box/window.
My efforts seem to have changed a few things. Waking from. sleep now insists I tap the blind top right button. Everything is now a lot slower and clumsier than before….
No sign of anything to tell me I’ve stumbled into Safe mode or not.
How you start in Safe Mode depends on whether you have an intel or Apple Silicon mac - by the way, I don't think you mentioned what mac you have.
In Intel macs, you press the power button and immediately press and hold Shift until the Apple logo shows.
In Apple Silicon macs, you press and hold the power button until the boot options appear; then hold the Shift key and select safe boot or similar (sorry, I don't have an Apple Silicon mac to confirm the exact details).
In any case, the letters "Safe Boot" would appear in red at the top in the login screen.
Safe Boot is definitely slower, and meant as a test, not as a way to regularly use your mac.
Copy the report
and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.
Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the cause of the problem.
When you are positing here in this site, you see this row of buttons below the area where you write:
the "additional text" is the one I marked with a red circle.
In Etrecheck, after it finishes doing its thing, click on Share Report and choose Copy
Then start a reply here, click the button mentioned above, and paste.
Major Issues:
Anything that appears on this list needs immediate attention.
Battery failure - Your battery is reporting that it needs to be serviced.
Kernel panics - This system has experienced kernel panics. This could be a sign of hardware failure.
Poor performance - EtreCheck report shows poor performance. This is unusual.
A failing battery can cause all sorts of trouble. Maybe the kernel panics are related to it.
I will look at the rest of the report.
Hi Luis, thanks for your reply!
I should have been more explicit: I’m cleaning up a forty-year-old parts catalogue, of which I have a scan, running to nine-hundred pages or so. I drag a page from the thumbnails and drop it onto Graphic Converter, where it is seen as a graphic. I then clean up the illustrations, the frame of lines around the material, and repair the text if necessary for it to be reasonably easily legible, but still recognisably coming from hte original. Once I’m done I save it as a pdf and drag it into the thumbnails, above or below where the original still sits. If it looks ok I then delete the original version.
As I skim through the catalogue I find little clumps of blank pages, and if I click on a thumbnail it will usually, but not always go blank.
That’s my problem!
Best regards, Tony.
Actually the saving, of the collective file, seems to be automatic in Preview. The one-page files I work on are dragged as Thumbnails from the big multi-page original onto Graphic Converter, and saved a pdf’s in GC. Thus I can drag them in the finder onto Preview, ask for Thumbnails, and drag the new thumbnail onto the Thumbnail column in the original document. Then I check that they are indeed an improvement, before deleting the out-of-date Thumbnail.
No obvious alternative method springs to mind!
And as I look for such an alternative I see that the folder in which Preview believes the files are to be found has vanished – or at least the finder search option cannot find it!
In case youu are wondering, I’ve used nothing but Macs since 1986, I think ...
As I wrote earlier in reply to your note (but it managed to get placed on my reply to Luis) :
"No obvious alternative method springs to mind!
"And as I look for such an alternative I see that the folder in which Preview believes the files are to be found has vanished – or at least the finder search option cannot find it!
I did a ’Save as’, having added a letter to the filename. Can’t find that either...
"In case you are wondering, I’ve used nothing but Macs since 1986, I think …"
Safe mode remains unavailable, after four attempts. The help system tells me what to do, but of course it ceases to be visible during the process. Still I only once forgot. Critically, the instruction for checking has nevere resulted in me being shown a ‘Boot mode’ link.
And I was able to find the hidden folder by hand (both search systems failed to find it. Thus I was able to drage the current version ont Acrobat Reader. Still blank pages. And all pages show in portrait style. Nul points, I suppose !
Best regards, Tony.
What can I do to prevent data loss in PDFs on MacBook Air Preview?
