Q: Cannot Open PDF Forward From iPhone

what a waste of my time.  apple care / support is total crap. the chat support person can't even VIEW links to these forums?? Really??? Of course the support person had no idea of the issue or it being listed as an outstanding issue for 9.3.2.  I'm having a senior support person call me back. Details as I get them. Not confident anything will be done.  Seems issues are fixed in the beta for 9.3.3 as someone previously posted.

It appears that iPhone is forwarding the whole email as an attachment, merging all email attachments with the email content itself into a single file. If you rename the pdf file extension to eml, you should be able to open it in an email program.

This did not work.  While outlook did open the message after changing the extension, there was no legible content, just some crazy characters, and no attachments.  However, if you open a good pdf document using notepad you will see they all begin the same with %PDF and then the version number and some tag-like content.  The pdf documents received from an iPhone, opened with notepad do not have the same format.  Below are 3 examples of extract from good PDF docs and 3 PDF docs sent from an iPhone.  Obviously, something on the iPhone (iOS, apple mail) is changing the format of a PDF document which makes no sense.  PDF means Portable Document Format and is supposed to be OS agnostic and portable across devices.

Good PDF docs

%PDF-1.4

2 0 obj
<<

%PDF-1.7
%âãÏÓ
1 0 obj
<</Type /Pages

%PDF-1.6
%âãÏÓ
2801 0 obj <<

Sent by iPhone

Eç Š÷~º&= ƒ1}5¾*Ü¢g(›mzã»ÛO Êf¢–g‡ «mÊ&×½µë^·Ó „Èœ®‹(~ÔŒLôž®÷«L´

Eç Š÷~º&= ƒ1}5¾*Ü¢g(›mzã»ÛO Êf¢–g‡ «mÊ&×½µë^·Ó „Èœ®‹(~ÔŒLôž®÷«L´

Eç Š÷~º&= ƒ1}5¾*Ü¢g(›mzã»ÛO Êf¢–g‡ «mÊ&×½µë^·Ó „Èœ®‹(~ÔŒLôž®÷«L´

I've had this issue for a while.

I found that deleting the Mail account on the iPhone, and then re-creating it fixed it....

However this only worked for a finite period of time, one device is corrupting the attachments again.

I would be very curious if you could let the group know what the "/Producer" tag is that exists in plain text within the PDF file (viewing a pdf with notepad) as it seems that only certain PDF files are effected?

We have not been able to successfully reproduce the issue and we are also hopeful that the 9.3.3 patch has resolved the issue altogether!

Obviously, something on the iPhone (iOS, apple mail) is changing the format of a PDF document which makes no sense.  PDF means Portable Document Format and is supposed to be OS agnostic and portable across devices.

That is the theory. In reality, there are so many tools now to "write" PDFs that these issues come up.

It's like sending a "word doc" now. What flavour? What version was it created in? How was it saved?

PDFs have suffered from simple font issues since day 1. If the creator does not embed or convert the fonts before saving, the receiver may not be able to render the file.

Checking the lineage of the sent file is part of the sleuthing you may need to do.

I don't know what the "/Producer" tag is, all I know is that every PDF file that opens correctly begins with %PDF, though that is not enough to guarantee they will open.  If you open jpegs and tifs with notepad you will also see a common pattern within the first line.  Probably with many file types.  If I have a file without an extension I open it with notepad to see if it is one I recognize.

That doesn't change the fact that an email with a pdf attachment forwarded by an iPhone produces an attachment that doesn't open on Windows when the same email forwarded by Outlook Web Access produces a workable PDF on any device.  And yet the attachment sent by the iPhone can be opened on the iPhone.  That points to an action in the iPhone mail process that "proprietizes" the attachment.

Same problem here.  PDF's are corrupt after being forwarded from an iPhone (latest patch but also previous patch level).  Those same PDF's are fine if forwarded with a different device.  This problem seems to have popped up in the last few months for us.

Yeah, it's definitely an issue with iPhone forwarded attachments. The leading text "Eç Š÷~º&" is consistent across multiple file types.

Search for the "%PDF" in the file and you might find your data. I was able to find the "PK" leader for a zip file, and it worked like a charm.

Same problem here. PDF successfully received and viewed in Apple Mail on either iPad or iPhone. I use Office365 as my email provider. If I forward the message and attachment, the recipient cannot see the attachment. Some have suggested Outlook for iOS may be a solution, but the Outlook app is little more than beta and really junky. It's time for Apple to fix this issue that has existed in, at least, 4 versions of iOS.