My Preview annotations are fading

Is it just me, or can nobody see all 4 screen shots?

This is happening to me as well. Ridiculous. Getting increasingly sick of Preview on Lion, crashes that never used to happen in Snow Leopard, can't set custom keyboard shortcuts without applying them to all applications, etc etc

Same here! This is really annoying I've been trying to find a fix forever. I'm not totally sure that it's iDisk related though because I tried the "duplicate" function on an annotated PDF that was on my desktop and I noticed the fading instantly. But it doesn't seem to affect every file. I'm very confused/frustrated

I've noticed the changes in "versions" also. I reported the bug here before I found this thread. I'm sure the more people who report it, the faster the issue will be taken care of.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

I suspect the problem to be related to a more general one in Lion. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3210568.

I am having the same problem, has anyone found a fix for this yet?

Ditto here. Preview used to be great for taking med school notes. Now that my highlights and underlines have started to fade it makes it difficult to trust this program for future use. I hope this is fixed soon so I don't have to switch to something else.

i noticed that if you go and view all of your annotations, you can select all of them as a whole and change their color and all will be viewable and not faded. However, this may not help if you color code your notes, as everything will be the same color...

Same issue here.

1. Do you know how to desactivate Versions for Preview?

2. Does it have anything to do with Dropbox? (I'm also syncing my pdf through dropbox ; please tell me if the issue is also present without Dropbox).

There is currently no way to disable versions in preview (at least not that I've found), and the problem occurs with or without dropbox.

This is a definite bug. It looks like something is causing the colours to be slowly pushed towards white with every save. Not sure what's causing the problem but I wrote a little python script to recover the highlights for my wife. Thought I would share:

#!/usr/bin/python

import re

import sys

if len(sys.argv) != 2:

print 'Wrong argument count'

exit(1)

infilename = sys.argv[1]

outfilename = infilename + ".fixed.pdf"

fpIn = open(infilename)

fpOut = open(outfilename, "w+")

line = fpIn.readline()

while line:

if re.search("^\<\< /Type /Annot", line):

line += fpIn.readline()

pos = line.find("endobj")

while pos == -1:

line += fpIn.readline()

pos = line.find("endobj")

if re.search("\/Highlight", line):

line = re.sub('/C \[.+\n?.+\n?\]', '/C [ 0.8396019 0.9160907\n0.5048240 ]', line)

fpOut.write(line)

line = fpIn.readline();

print "Done"

Save it as /usr/bin/FixHighlights and run from terminal with FixHighlights {filename}

It will output a new file called {filename}.fixed.pdf.

Unfortunately there's no way of knowing what colour they should have been originally so all highlights will be set to green.

I wrote it quickly as an excuse to learn some python so use at your own risk 🙂

I have the same problem and found a comparable simple way to recreate old annotations, highlightings etc:

Click the "Show Annotations List" and select multiple annotations of the same color (if you can still figure it out) and then just set the color for all of them.

It is still annoying but it is a rather fast way to prevent your annotations from "whiting out".

Easiest when done regularly before it gets white so you dont have to guess/remember what color it used to be.

Here is another way to fix a pdf with faded annotations:

-show the list of annotations (click on the last button in the annotation toolbar).

-select each and every annotations in the same (faded) colour (by clicking+cmd on each one of them).

-change the colour for all the selected annotations at the same time (by selecting the colour in the colour button, in the annotation toolbar).

I've just done it in a 200 pdf with highlights in 3 different colours, and it took a while. Of course, if you highlight in a single colour it's much quicker to solve.

Now I've got the file blocked, and I hope it won't fade anymore, but I can't highlight either!

If Apple doesn't fix this quickly, I'll just have to move to another pdf annotator software. 😠

paddytheprogrammer wrote:

This is a definite bug. It looks like something is causing the colours to be slowly pushed towards white with every save. Not sure what's causing the problem but I wrote a little python script to recover the highlights for my wife. Thought I would share:

#!/usr/bin/python

import re

import sys

if len(sys.argv) != 2:

print 'Wrong argument count'

exit(1)

infilename = sys.argv[1]

outfilename = infilename + ".fixed.pdf"

fpIn = open(infilename)

fpOut = open(outfilename, "w+")

line = fpIn.readline()

while line:

if re.search("^\<\< /Type /Annot", line):

line += fpIn.readline()

pos = line.find("endobj")

while pos == -1:

line += fpIn.readline()

pos = line.find("endobj")

if re.search("\/Highlight", line):

line = re.sub('/C \[.+\n?.+\n?\]', '/C [ 0.8396019 0.9160907\n0.5048240 ]', line)

fpOut.write(line)

line = fpIn.readline();

print "Done"

Save it as /usr/bin/FixHighlights and run from terminal with FixHighlights {filename}

It will output a new file called {filename}.fixed.pdf.

Unfortunately there's no way of knowing what colour they should have been originally so all highlights will be set to green.

I wrote it quickly as an excuse to learn some python so use at your own risk 🙂

I really don't know how to use Python scripts. I am pretty computer savy though. Can you please show me how to run this. I highlighted soemthing for class also 100+ pages and they are all fading away. I can really use this. Thanks.