PDF text gets distorted in Retina Preview

It happens to me all the time too. PDFs get mangled. But it also happens in Pages! It used to happen a bit in pages on my old non-Retina MBP, but now that I have a Retina display many PDFs are pretty much unreadable. All I can do is magnify them and hope for the best.

It really looks there is a problem with arithmetic when doing font calculations.

Thank you apple for the beautiful display, NOW PLEASE PAY ATTENTION AND FIX THE BUGS! I feel like I am using a beta product. The Retina is still very rough around the edges.

I have the same problem with my macbook pro retina running 10.8.2. As soon as a scroll in a pdf in preview, the text on the edges get blurry and distorted.

Here you can see an example (see 4th & 5th line and also last line)

I also tried to delete the preview plist files but that did not change anything.

Interestingly, this problem does not happen with the retina-enabled built-in pdf viewer in the Chrome browser.

Apple, please adress this problem, this is really annoying and I bought a retina mbp because I have to read lots of PDFs, which does not work properly.

I just bought a 13" retina display mb pro and am noticing similar things with PDFs using Preview. some lines looks like they are "cut off" at the bottom and others are distorted or look like a scan line is missing. Some letters on the margins are also distorted. If I zoom in or out those lines get fixed, but sometimes others are broken. Has there been any progress on this? Its very annoying!

Have you tried viewing the document(s) in Adobe Reader - http://get.adobe.com/reader/?

Clinton

yes it seems to not happen there, but I really don't like reader as it seems so clunky. Preview is much quicker, but has this problem on the retina. Makes no sense since Preview is an Apple product so you'd think it would work better.

more and more it looks like apple does not care much about the kind of people who read papers... they have a whole other new market that doesn't have much need for reading actual stuff. so much for 'geeks' sticking with the company till iOS came along. i called tech support about this and they need me to have applecare in order to be able to ask me to go eff myself.

Same problem: scrolling lug is so much noticable, that it stands out from overall user experience. Looks like Preview app is not optimized for hardware or OS.

Please fix

Same problem here, noticed it about three-four months ago. Have been using Mountain Lion on my 13'' rMBP for about eight months, though. Seems as if it was introduced by an update... Any ideas on that? Apart from that, no word from apple yet? Really disappointing!

I have the same problem. It occurs when I scroll a PDF document and some text that appears on the screen is distorted. Distortion goes away after I select the text. The bug is pretty annoying - in the worst case I have to select the text with a mouse every time I scroll a PDF document, which is really distracting.

The problem occurs in Preview when reading PDF documents with "Continuous Scroll" enabled (View -> Continuous Scroll).

Hardware: MacBook Pro 13" Retina (purchased summer 2013)

Software: OS X version 10.8.5, Preview version 6.0.1.

Just had a troubleshooting session with Apple support. Nice folks over there, but no solution. They have suggested to do SMC reset (hold Shift+Ctrl+Option + power button for 5 seconds while computer is off) and NVRAM reset (hold Cmd+Option+P+R while restarting computer until you hear startup chime twice). I did this, but nothing changed.

More details on the bug: it only occurs when scrolling horizontally. So in order to reproduce the bug, you have to zoom in first, to be able to scroll left or right. Scrolling vertically doesn't seem to distort the text.

It seems it has nothing to do with "Continuous Scroll" option, contraty to what I said in the previous reply. The mode can be Single Page as well - just zoom in, scroll horizontally back and fourth and the distortion will appear.

I wouldn't count on Apple to do anything about this at this moment. Hopefully things will work better in Maverics.

Same problem here on retina 13" with 10.8.

Does it get better with 10.9 ?

q2e,

Which version of Adobe Reader are you using to view PDF files?

Or are you using Preview?

Clinton

Mavericks fixed it for me indeed.

Cheers,

C