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strange boxes showing up in PDF print and normal printing

Hello-

Wondering if anyone is having this issue after the good old El Capitan upgrade. When using Pages, and opening previously created documents OR newly created documents, when I print them as PDFs or print them in my normal printer, black square boxes are showing up throughout every document.

The black boxes show up wherever there is a paragraph break. If I use a line break everywhere (shift+enter), the black boxes do not appear when printed. But everywhere the normal paragraph break (enter) is used, these dang boxes show up. It appears that the PDFs are being written or saved in an odd manner. Most of the boxes in question are being written to a different "layer" and I've tried opening the PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro and I am able to remove the squares. In most cases, they are included on a separate layer than the original text, and when removing within them Acrobat the document appears correct.

I am completely hampered here, and cannot create PDFs which I used every day, and cannot print anything out on paper from within Pages with these boxes.

I am using Font Agent Pro and have been back-and-forth with their technical support. They cannot recreate this error on their end, and say it doesn't have anything to do with the font manager. They have been a great help, but are completely baffled.

I have tried using multiple different fonts, system and non-system fonts. I have tried creating new documents vs using previously created documents. I have tried even saving as PDF again with the originally created PDF. I've tried copying content from previous docs into new docs and it still happens. Nothing works and I cannot get rid of these boxes.

I have tried using the previous version of Pages 4.3 to test it out, and this older version works fine and does NOT produce these boxes, it works fine. But most of my documents have been upgraded long ago to the latest version of Pages. Another strange thing is that it is happening on both of my two different computers after the El Capitan bombshell upgrade. Mac Pro (early 2009) and Mac Pro Retina (mid 2012).

Help!!! Anyone having this issue, or just me? I've included a screenshot of the boxes from a PDF created from Pages.

Thank you for any insight, much appreciated.

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 15, 2015 3:26 PM

53 replies

Oct 28, 2015 11:47 AM in response to Magias

Hi Magias-

Thanks for the reply.

I think the problem for me personally here is that I don't use Font Book App to handle my fonts, system or non-system, I used Font Agent Pro. So I am not sure if this approach will have any negative consequences or conflicts with my current setup.

On a lighter note, I did receive an email from the iWork team, asking me to send them an original Pages document that is having this issue, so at least they are aware of this issue and being proactive with finding a fix.

I'll keep you all updated if I hear back from them.

Thanks!

Oct 29, 2015 11:14 AM in response to jessefromtuolumne

Just want to chime in that I am seeing this exact issue in Page 5.6 (2553) and El Capitan 10.11.1 (15B42). For me, the problematic font is Garamond Narrow.

Oct 29, 2015 4:52 PM in response to Rusty Ross

Yup. The problem as I indicated earlier is that all fonts from 'Apple Font Pack' (garamond narrow and other fonts I listed) are crippled in El Capitan. This issue has nothing to do with Pages. You will have the same problem in Word and other programs when using Garamond Narrow.

Oct 30, 2015 8:11 AM in response to Viswanath Tumu

As stated in my original issue, this is happening just in the latest version of Pages. I've tried multiple basic text editors and even Pages 4.3 does not have this issue when printing or creating PDFs from the exact same document.

Although these issues are somehow related, I think they are not identical.

Oct 30, 2015 11:46 AM in response to jessefromtuolumne

I think it's just you guys. Whenever I print from Pages it works just fine. I've got El Capitan and Pages 5.6, and I'm using from the Apple Font Pack.

Utopique

Level 1

4 points

Nov 2, 2015 8:47 AM in response to jessefromtuolumne

This problem seems universal since El Capitan. It's font dependent. If you are not using one of the affected fonts you won't have the problem. Apple have changed the way fonts are used, including the display fonts, and it seems that some fonts are not "approved" or are simply excluded. I don't know what the answer is, but restoring standard fonts with the Font Book App simply removes or switches off the offending fonts. I am a writer, and have always used New Century Schoolbook. It's what I am comfortable with. But since El Capitan, although my documents appear perfectly normal on screen, they print boxes instead of letters. The same applies if I save the document as a PDF.

_Mitch_

Level 1

0 points

Nov 25, 2015 5:34 PM in response to Utopique

I have a very similar problem, it only affects some PDFs, only in El Capitan and yes I agree it seems font dependent. All PDFs display fine in Preview. But then when printing some PDFs, boxes replace text. This also happens if doing anything that re-saves the PDF (exporting/duplicating/mailing/etc), from that point the on screen PDF also shows boxes.

I don't think it's a case of some fonts deliberately not being approved/excluded, I think it's a bug in Preview that affects some fonts. Upon re-saving a PDF with embedded fonts like ArialNarrow and CenturyGothic, I open up the re-saved PDF and look at the list of embedded fonts. They've been replaced with fonts that have substituted every capitalised letter in the font name for the next letter in the alphabet e.g. ArialNarrow turns into BrialOarrow, CenturyGothic turns into DenturyHothic etc. Obviously these fonts don't exist so it's probably falling back to a system font when trying to display, thus the boxes. I'm guessing the same thing happens when I try to print.

Dec 6, 2015 4:20 PM in response to Utopique

I'm having the same problem, with Avant Garde. I use this font extensively. When I tried to validate the font in Font Book, it returned an error, and advised me to remove the font. Oops. Bad idea.

Does anyone have a solution to this problem? Any PDF I create is messed up now, because I use Avant Garde a lot.

Dec 18, 2015 1:52 PM in response to Viswanath Tumu

These are very old fonts, and over time likely to be incompatible in some form. However,they were supplied for Apple and we should have been informed they could stop working.

I ran Font Book's Validate process on all my font holdings when I discovered this issue afflicted my iMac 27" Late 2012. While most of the properties of the fonts were OK, it appears that a 'name' table issue was found. Something here prevents the font from printing correctly, but on-screen renders look fine; so you don't know until you waste paper on it (or write a PDF and view it).

Since I've had Macs since the early 90s, my fonts came across from the original machines that introduced TrueType fonts (some had 'Last Modified' dates in 1993!). My solution was to remove these fonts from my iMac - I know there are multiple docs in my archives in Word and Excel that use these fonts (I especially liked Avant Garde), but I've accepted that I'll need to find and assign another valid Font if I ever want to see or print those docs again.

BTW, I wonder if there are newer versions of these fonts you could obtain from somewhere?

jamesee

Level 1

8 points

Dec 21, 2015 3:57 PM in response to Beamerboy

I'm having this problem too. In my case the font in question is Nadianne. I don't now remember whether this was originally supplied by Microsoft or Apple but I have used it as a distinctive letterhead for my business documents. It shows just fine in Microsoft Word (2011) under El Capitan (10.11.2) but if I try to make a PDF from the print menu - or to print it, I just get the annoying boxes in place of each character.

Dec 21, 2015 4:51 PM in response to jamesee

Nadianne is a Bucket o' Fonts font.

Use another. I had one of those where the @ symbol showed up on screen but didn't print out on a major customer's letterhead. Cost me vastly more than all the fonts combined, to reprint.

Peter

jamesee

Level 1

8 points

Dec 23, 2015 5:18 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

Thanks. I've already done that as a temporary measure but I'd still like to fix the root cause and get my logo looking right again.

As in your case the cost of the time spent trying to sort this out was a significant issue.

jenboote

Level 1

13 points

Jan 9, 2016 8:12 PM in response to jessefromtuolumne

I'm having a similar problem but I found a work-around. I took a screen selection capture of what I wanted to print and then printed it through preview and it worked. It's the long way around but it got me what I needed!

rjb2012

Level 1

8 points

Jan 10, 2016 3:10 AM in response to Utopique

I don't know if this will help, but El Capitan may not be the root cause, since I am still running Mavericks (os 10.9.5) on all my Macs. I am having the same problem of Bookman and Old English Text printing as boxes from my MacBookPro 15 (2014) to several HP printers. The problem suddenly began 3 or 4 weeks ago and started happening on all 4 of my other Macs and iMac. It's like a virus that has spread through all my Pages documents. The work around has been to convert all forms and documents to "old Bookman" probably a 'true type" font from OS 9.

However today, Turbotax Home and Office 2015 tax forms began printing with boxes instead of letters or numbers for the entered data on one Mac, but okay on another. TT forms print from Adobe .pdf and I haven't figured out a way to convert their fonts to something else. Now I am afraid to upgrade to El Capitan until this problem is solved. My business is mainly form, document and correspondence production, and this is a big problem that I hope can be solved quickly.

Jan 12, 2016 8:21 AM in response to jessefromtuolumne

I'm having a similar problem. My version of Avant Garde, which came packaged with an Apple LaserWriter back in 1993 or so, worked fine until upgraded to El Capitan. I'm an architect and Avant Garde was my typical font, used in thousands of files over the years. I tried substituting other fonts for the miss behaving Avant Garde, but the text wrapping, overall font size, etc, was different (including using a modern version of ITC Avant Garde), so I was forced to downgrade to Yosemite and things look normal again. I'd love to use El Capitan, as long as Avant Garde would work. I am hoping there is a way to either fix El Capitan to be compatible, or to fix the Avant Garde font file to provide the missing postscript images. If anyone else has a fix (other than font substitution), I'd love to hear about it.

strange boxes showing up in PDF print and normal printing