Preview PDF Text Glitches

I've had the same issue. PDFs that are downloaded look wierd in Preview, almost as if they've been superimposed with japanese characters.

The same documents look fine in Adobe Reader.

Perhaps the documents are using strange fonts that only Adboe can substitute for?

I've just noticed this over the last 3 days or so.

I'm replying to my own post; I know 🙂

Anyway, here's an update on my situation. When the original PDFs didn't work, I downloaded and installed Acrobat Reader. The PDFs worked in Reader, and I didn't thing much more about it. A few days later, I re-opened the files in Preview to show him the problem, and the PDFs displayed fine!

Now they PDFs work fine both in Reader and Preview. All I can think of is that Reader installed some fonts (or something else) that were necessary in the PDFs I couldn't previously display.

The mystery continues...

Thanks for the note!

I have seen the same behaviour on some PDFs: In Preview.app the text is just square boxes while Acrobat Reader shows it fine.

The last time I tested this the Preview.app wasn't cured by the presence of Acrobat but then I had an old Acrobat install. I'll try if a fresh Acrobat install is any better for Preview (I haven't ever installed Acrobat on this PB).

I had exactly the same problem. PDFs that had previously looked fine in preview now had strange characters replacing certain fonts. I had the idea to use Safari to open the PDF to see if it would still show the problems (you can right click on a pdf in the Finder to to this or use the 'open -a' command in the Terminal). To my surprise the PDF displayed fine using Safari. I then made Safari open the PDF using Preview and it remained ok. So hopefully this approach will work again in future.

Keith

I have been struggling with this problem as well. I'm using an Intel core duo Mac mini with Tiger 10.4.7. I've noticed that Preview has problems with fonts as described in this discussion. However, I've also seen that if you close and reopen the same pdf in Preview, sometimes the document is displayed correctly, and sometimes the problems is just different: differently garbled characters. Sometimes the documents also print with the garbled characters, too. However, I've noticed the problem (also intermittent) when viewing pdfs with Safari AND Acrobat. I've since deleted Acrobat and its plug-ins on the advice of Apple Support. This seemed to solve the problem temoprarily, but it's crreping back now.

I've been having this problem on and off for a year. It seems intermittent.

Every once in a while when opening up PDFs in Preview (which is a heck of a lot faster than Acrobat) the files would have glyphs throughout them ... not just on screen but even when I printed.

However, after reading this thread, I went back into Font Book and "resolved duplicates" of all the fonts I usually use. (I have nearly 500 turned off.)

After that I opened up the PDFs I was having a problem with and, for now at least, it seems resolved. Who knows what tomorrow will bring ...

PB G4 1.67/17"; iMac G4 20"; TiB G4 500; + 3 G3s Mac OS X (10.4.1)

PB G4 1.67/17"; iMac G4 20"; TiB G4 500; + 3 G3s Mac OS X (10.4.1)

PB G4 1.67/17"; iMac G4 20"; TiB G4 500; + 3 G3s Mac OS X (10.4.1)