Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Hi there,
for some time now, my Preview doesn't render PDFs correctly.
In many PDFs the main Font is white.
I still can mark, copy and paste the text. It's just rendered white.
So I installed Acrobat Reader to see wether the PDF is broken,
but Acrobat renders the font in black …
Anyone got any Idea?
Image1: PDF in Preview.
Image 2: Same PDF in Acrobat Reader
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Normal, actually. As Adobe releases new versions of Acrobat, it adds features. So when users create PDF files from these newer versions of Acrobat Pro, Preview has trouble displaying them since it doesn't support the new format. Apple does what it can to make Preview compatible to Adobe's PDF format, but they are forced to always play a game of "catch up". And even then, Apple can't always figure out how to parse the new data.
Normal, actually. As Adobe releases new versions of Acrobat, it adds features. So when users create PDF files from these newer versions of Acrobat Pro, Preview has trouble displaying them since it doesn't support the new format. Apple does what it can to make Preview compatible to Adobe's PDF format, but they are forced to always play a game of "catch up". And even then, Apple can't always figure out how to parse the new data.
Ah. Sorry! I should have mentioned: It's also displays the same Error in older PDFs (my Master Thesis which I created with XSL:FO and FOP Command Line Tool in 2002) which worked perfectly in Preview before. So I guess it either is a kind of broken Font, or some Bug or Setting-Error in Preview.
To see if the issue is system wide, or confined to your user account, create a new account and open the PDF with Preview there. If it displays correctly, then the issue is something in your account.
Good Hint. Found out this: My other account doesn't have this problem. Aaand: The PDF Rendering inside Safari also doesn't have the problem, even with my regular account … weird.
So it may just be a preference file or font caches. You can clear all of the font cache files on your Mac this way:
Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:
sudo atsutil databases -remove
This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and all user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
Ah! Yeah that's it! After cleaning the caches an restarting, I got an error-notice on a strange font with the advice to delete the font, which I did an now everythings back to normal.
Thanks a lot!
Aha! So the cause was a corrupt font, which Font Book could then warn you about when it was trying to activate it in a "first time" fashion.
Glad you figured it out.
Kurt,
Many thanks for your "Font Management in OS X" document. Perhaps you could tell me whether you think this issue (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4867610) is related and whether you have any advice on this.
Ick! It's hard to say what's going on there. Many long time Mac users are not at all happy what Apple did to Preview. You could use the Snow Leopard version of Preview in Lion, but not in ML.
I'm a bit confused why you would take your PDF files into Preview when you have Acrobat Pro XI. Is there something you use Preview for that Acrobat can't do? If at all possible, I'd avoid Preview completely.
I only wanted to stick with Preview because it felt smoother, had a cleaner presentation when reading and researching, and I liked that my sticky notes weren't smack on top of text. Also, Preview seems to use less system resources. I will re-try Skim, but I've also downloaded regular Adobe Reader, which is a bit less clunky. Trick is to see if saving it thru Reader returns the same problem. Thanks for acknowledging the issue!
White Font in Preview App
