How do I get rid of checkerboard images from my PDF on Mac Preview?

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drjsimpson Author

Level 1

4 points

How do I get rid of checkerboard images from my PDF on Mac Preview?

I am currently running:

OS X El Capitan 10.11.5

MacBook Pro Retina 15', 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB RAM, Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

Whenever I save a .docx or .doc (in Microsoft Word 2016 for Mac) and export it as a PDF and I open it with Mac Preview, "checkerboard" images fill all the white spaces.

How do I fix this? Is there an update I missed? Or is this on Microsoft Word's end? I have had to use adobe acrobat to open PDFs where this happens, but I would rather not...

Thanks,

Derek

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), Mac Preview, Microsoft Word 2016

Posted on May 31, 2016 5:45 PM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,248 points

May 31, 2016 6:57 PM in response to drjsimpson

The checkerboard normally signifies a transparent background. You can override this Preview behavior with the following command in the Terminal. Quit Preview before you perform this command, and the next launch of Preview will prevent the checkboard effect.

Triple-click the following command line to select it, and then paste into a Terminal (Launchpad : Other : Terminal) window. Press return.

/usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.Preview PDFShowsCheckerboardBackground -bool False

Tested: OS X 10.11.5.

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