10.6.7 PDF Creation unreadable in any other OS just readable in Mac

We can report what seems to be the same problem:

1. No difficulties authoring documents with OpenType fonts, such as Myriad.

2. PDFs appear OK in Preview.

3. Fonts are garbled when opening PDFs in Adobe Acrobat (Mac or Windows).

4. It is not possible to save a PostScript version of these documents, due to reported errors. (These are the "Save as PostScript" or "Save as Adobe PDF" options in the Print dialog).

We can confirm this behavior on two different machines, and several different apps. Producing a Catalog page from FontBook is a ready way to check.

Please report to Apple to alert them to the various situations where this problem arises.

Reinstalling 10.6 and then the 10.6.6 combo update takes perhaps an hour, but is pretty simple to do. But it fixes all of this.

I am not having any of these issues. Create in PDFpen v 5.22, open in Preview and re-arrange page order - no issues. Verified by sending to my Win 7 and Adobe X - it opens and all looks the same as in Mac Preview.

It is an Adobe Multiple Master font that has worked flawlessly until I updated to 10.6.7 Tuesday night. Yesterday it started dropping the "i" and "l" characters. The space would be there but the character wouldn't show. This morning all that showed was random garbage characters. I called Apple this morning and they were unaware of any font problems

Interesting, considering that one of the things which Apple says 10.6.7 is specifically supposed to do is "Resolves an issue in which some Multiple Master (MM) fonts were missing from Mac Pro (Mid 2010), MacBook Pro (15-inch & 17-inch Mid 2010), and iMac (Mid 2010) computers."

I have noticed that some pdf files obtained from various sources are missing "i" and "l" characters. It does make for interesting reading! This has been observed in my office over many years and is not restricted to Mac or Windows. I think it must be a font issue, but have never had the need to track it down. Sometimes, opening the pdf on a different computer results in a more readable file. I think this is part of what led Adobe to develop pdf-x for distribution as that embeds the fonts.

bd

Jeffrey Folinus1 wrote:
4. It is not possible to save a PostScript version of these documents, due to reported errors. (These are the "Save as PostScript" or "Save as Adobe PDF" options in the Print dialog).

Please report to Apple to alert them to the various situations where this problem arises.

This is not Apple's problem. MacOS X does NOT say "Save as Adobe PDF". That is an indicator that Adobe has made its own modifications to your operating system. If you are having problems with Adobe's modifications to your operating system after updating to MacOS X 10.6.7, contact Adobe.

In the interim, remove your Adobe PDF products, re-apply the 10.6.7 Combo updater. You should be able to print to PDF again. If you are the adventurous sort, you might even try reinstalling Adobe PDF support after this. It might even work. You'll never know until you try. If you wait for Apple to fix it, you will just never know period.

To the naysayers:

1. The problem is not "caused by installing Adobe Acrobat". It occurs when doing "Save As PostScript" using Apple's own print mechanism that does not go through Acrobat AT ALL. It also occurs printing directly to laser printers too -- again, not via Acrobat in any way.
In fact, product that write their OWN PostScript, like InDesign and Quark do not suffer from the problem.

2. The problem is most common in output from third-party software (which worked perfectly well before the update). Viewing PDFs in Preview is not a sufficient test -- viewing them in Acrobat or other PDF viewer, such as on Windows, will flag errors parsing the PDF.

3. The problem occurs with OpenType fonts, particularly Myriad Pro, but I have experienced it with other Linotype original quality fonts. Simply changing the font fixes the issue. Again, these fonts should work fine and worked fine before the update.

This IS something that Apple has broken in their implementation of PostScript and PDF generation. Even assuming that Apple is doing something "right", and every other company in the world is now "wrong" and must rewrite all their software to work on Macs, a "stable" release should not break products that are using documented APIs.

Incidentally, user-installed Multiple Master fonts have been deprecated for many years. The only MMs should be those that the OS and Adobe products use on the fly.

I have solved the problem I was having with the Multiple Master font dropping "i's" and "l's" but not before the font started showing random characters. As this is a new computer and I had transferred fonts over from my previous computer (Power Mac G5 running Leopard) I found that I had a lot of duplicate fonts in my "user's library." I deleted all of these, then moved the offending font (Graphite MM) to the "system library." Everything seems to work properly now. Don't really know why, it just works.

BTW, the font file shows a creation date in 1993, a veritable digital antique. Its probably part of the problem. I bought this font about 15 years ago and have used it in all my cad drawings. It would be a disaster to have to replace it. I do notice that Adobe has updated it to an Open Type font but somehow I don't think I should have to purchase it again for more than $200.

This may be a side effect of the security fixes in 10.6.7

See the following: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4581
Look for the "ATS" sections.

It turns out my work computer used to have Acrobat on it before I removed it. I can confirm that PDFs created with Adobe Open Type fonts are unreadable with Acrobat on Windows. However, other PDF viewers on Windows were able to open the PDFs with no problem.

Is it an Apple bug? Maybe. But if so, it is a bug shared by other commercial and open-source PDF products.
Is it an Adobe bug? Maybe. But considering they are the de-facto PDF standard, this may be one Apple will have to fix.

Same problem here. Since upgrading to 10.6.7 Adobe Acrobat Professional (8.2.6) cannot open PDFs. Frustrating....

small workaround for printing a good looking pdf in preview.app export as highres PNG and then print it

Hi - We are an architecture firm having the same problems, except that the issue doesn't appear to just be PDFs.

I don't know the mechanics behind this, but we are not able to print intelligible documents to our Canon Plotter and Xerox MFP from our drafting program. Same thing with PDFs. The plotter will leave out large amounts of information on our drawings, even though the Preview app shows the info. The MFP will simply give us an error message.

I have downgraded to 10.6.6, which fixes the problem.

Hi there.
I've got an iMac intel 2 GHz at work, updated on 10.6.7 and I don't seem to have this issue: I tried to create a pdf using the print and save as pdf commands from word 2011, and a pc user colleague was able to read it! And I tried the same way to create a ps and was able to reread it.
So what???

test with new iMac with 10.6.3
with Safari web page
save to PDF. Open on an other Mac in 10.5.8
10.6.3 : OK
update 10.6.4 : OK
update 10.6.5 : OK
update 10.6.6 : OK
*update 10.6.7 : blank page.*

I just don't get it. Seems that the pdf export via "Print" works fine on this iMac with 10.6.7.
I didn't go to Lourdes, though...