Preview shows blank pages when opening some pdf files, which display content as icons and also when opened in Adobe Acrobat Pro

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Level 1

10 points

Preview shows blank pages when opening some pdf files, which display content as icons and also when opened in Adobe Acrobat Pro

When opening some pdf documents with Preview, the pages are rendered blank even though content is displayed in the Finder icon and in Adobe Acrobate Pro. I'm using a Mac Book Pro 13-inch late 2013, El Capitan 10.11.1 OS, 2.6 GHz intel core i5 processor, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory. Preview is version 8.1 (877). I did not have this problem before the most recent upgrade of El Capitan.

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Nov 25, 2015 10:17 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Mitch Stone

Level 1

44 points

Nov 25, 2015 6:18 PM in response to BlackRyno

This is only one of the many problems I am having with Preview in El Capitan. I use a lot of OCR'd scanned documents. These documents cause Preview to randomly display pages as blank, thumbnails as blank, and at super-low res. Sometimes waiting or zooming in or out clears it up, but not consistently. When I start seeing those problems, Preview will always hang within minutes if not seconds, requiring a force quit. The only work-around I have found that helps at all is to quit Preview before it hangs, and open it again. This clears up the issues for a little while at least, but they always reoccur, usually within a few minutes. The other work-around is to set Adobe Reader as your default PDF viewer. I haven't become quite that desperate yet but that time is coming soon.

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Answer 2

BlackRyno Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 25, 2015 6:18 PM in response to Mitch Stone

Dear Mitch,

I haven't experienced the additional problems you mention. I don't recall the sources of the pdf's in earlier failures, but the latest was a digitalized book from Cambridge U. Press. (For all I know, they might have just scanned the 2002 print version and ocr'ed it.)

But one phenomenon of interest: Clicking on the "Contact Sheet" option did cause Preview to hang. But after I force quit it and relaunched it, the document automatically displayed, ironically, set to the last page read in Adobe Acrobat. (When Preview launches it automatically opens all previously open files. Oddly, this is not a behavior one can choose or choose not to have in Preferences.) Unlike in your situation, the rendering of the text doesn't degrade over time. Sorry your problems continue.

What I find disgraceful, is that there's no way to register these bugs directly with Apple. Instead you have to hang out in a discussion group and cross your fingers that some other user has discovered a workaround for the kludge.

Rob

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Answer 3

Nov 26, 2015 3:13 PM in response to BlackRyno

The PDFs I am having the most difficultly reading are over a gigabyte in size (scanned old newspapers with an OCR overlay). By far the best performing version of Preview for this purpose was in Snow Leopard. Word searching performance really went down after that, but at least it worked, until El Capitan. Something is really broken now. I thought perhaps the unusually large files I am reading and searching was the cause, but it seems others are having the problem as well. I've been sending crash reports to Apple, dozens of them by now. You can add a note to the crash report but I wonder if anyone reads them.

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Answer 4

BlackRyno Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 26, 2015 5:59 PM in response to Mitch Stone

Have you tried Skim? I just downloaded the latest update and had no problems opening the file that Preview had rendered blank. (I used to use Skim as a rule instead of Preview and never had a problem.) You can download it for free at http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ . (Just be advised that you're Mac won't let you open it unless you reset your Security settings to allow for non-Apple approved apps.)

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Answer 5

Marja E

Level 1

43 points

Jan 26, 2016 9:59 AM in response to BlackRyno

I'm having similar problems. I rarely use Safari as a browser, due to it's cookie handling and its lack of accessibility features, but I might use it as a pdf reader.

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