PDF documents appear jumbled in Preview

Hi there,

You should have a copy of Acrobat Reader on your
Mac. It's not used by default but you can drag the
PDF onto it and it should open up. Maybe it will do
a better job and have more font information.

- Chops

Though it may be true that Acrobat does a better job with fonts than Preview does and it may serve as a reasonable workaround, it does not answer the actual question: How to get Arial and/or other broken fonts to display correctly in Preview.

I'm having the same problem. A group I belong to publishes a newsletter using M$ Publisher. A recent auto-upgrade resulted in several of us receiving gibberish.

We did some testing, and couldn't find a single otherwise-common font that would work across the PC/Mac divide.

So it would be nice to know if this is a problem that originates and is fixable with Preview, or if we're just out of luck with Preview.

I have tried a recent Acrobat, and the latest version does work. I don't know if the others who are experiencing this problem are viewing in Acrobat or Preview.

I have found that you can copy the gibberish text out of the PDF and paste it into another application (in my case, I tried Eudora and Word) and at least read it there. So it seems to be a problem with Preview itself.

For the record, I'm using Preview 2.1.0 (v211) on OS 10.3.9 with all relevant updates.

Bill,

Open the application Font Book. Is Ariel active there? If not, do an Edit>Enable Font.

While you're in Font Book, if you have any duplicated fonts (they'll have a bullet by them), highlight them (one by one) and do an Edit>Resolve Duplicates.

Hope this helps.

Bob