Some PDF are printed out with empty squares replacing the text

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Some PDF are printed out with empty squares replacing the text

I have some bills from my electricity and gas provider and all the bills are printed out with squares being displayed instead of text. I already restored the Font Book to default fonts. I have no problems with viewing any of those bills on my computer. I have other PDFs and they are all printed out correctly. If I open up the PDF which is printed out badly and export it to PDF within PREVIEW app, the output is same as on my printer. I tried to restore all fonts to default ones and I tried to reinstall last OSX update with combo update, still the same.

What else can I do to restore the normal printing?

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2009), OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), Crucial 8GB DDR3, Samsung 840 Pro 256MB

Posted on Jul 31, 2016 1:36 AM

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Answer 1

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svkrzn Author

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Aug 9, 2016 12:13 AM in response to andrew_clark

I have tried my PDF on my friends brand new mac with the latest OS El Capitan. Same problem. So at least now I know it's not my computer's problem. And I also get an answer at stackexchange which cites that:

I have seen this issue before, and it appears to be a bug in Preview on 10.11. It does something weird with specific TrueType fonts (including some previously supplied by Apple) that causes this effect. The documents in question view perfectly fine, but when you try to save or print from Preview, it re-encodes them incorrectly in some way, resulting in the squares.

The same documents view, save and print fine in all 10 previous versions of OS X, and also work perfectly fine on every other platform.

I've seen some suggestions that replacing / fixing your system fonts will fix it - however, that won't help in a lot of cases - particularly not with third party PDFs, since the fonts will be subsetted and embedded in the document.

Your best option is to attempt to report it to Apple. It's a real problem, because there's millions of PDFs out there already created that can't just change because Apple decides they're not going to fix their product.

You should also report it to your energy provider - their print supplier may be able to work around the issue by changing fonts or rendering the text as an image.

Of course, that won't help the unknown number of future PDFs you may encounter with the problem, so definitely do report it to Apple. The more people that report it, the more they'll come to see it's a problem that needs fixing.

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Answer 2

svkrzn Author

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Aug 6, 2016 1:50 AM in response to andrew_clark

I would rather not install adobe product on adobe free computer just to print out PDFs... Google Chrome uses it's own PDF preview within the app and it prints out the same thing as Preview.app does. Permissions are fine too.

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Answer 3

Aug 7, 2016 12:43 AM in response to svkrzn

I get what you are saying about Adobe, but you're asking for help and part of the process of trying to find the problem is troubleshooting the possible causes by eliminating things that are not the problem. Maybe you can fix it on your own without any help from the forums? Or maybe you could try installing Adobe Acrobat Reader and try to print out the PDFs. If it doesn't work, just uninstall the offending Adobe app. If it does work, well then… But if you're unwilling to try something just because you don't want any Adobe on your Mac, then you might as well stop right now and forget trying to get the issue resolved. After all, what else are you unwilling to try? Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to offend you, rather I'm trying to get you to see this from a perspective of trying to get the issue resolved. In that view, you have to be willing to try things as part of a process of elimination to narrow down to what the actual problem is. If you're still unwilling to try new things, then you may be unwilling to move forward to find the resolution to the problem. In that case, best wishes.

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Answer 4

svkrzn Author

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Aug 7, 2016 12:45 AM in response to andrew_clark

Thanks, Adobe Acrobat Reader indeed prints the file out as it is. No problems.

Although I'd rather not keep Acrobat Reader just for my energy provider bills. That's why I wanted to find the solution within the OSX. Might be missing fonts? But I wouldn't be able to view the file at all on my computer if it was that.

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Answer 5

Aug 7, 2016 11:23 PM in response to svkrzn

Not sure what the actual issue would be. I have found a lot of times that using Preview (or other PDF viewers) instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader can cause weird issues — especially when printing. Apple is obviously doing something different with Preview than Adobe does with Acrobat Reader. I would be curious to see if the issue still exists on a new user account on the same Mac. You could try just creating a “test user” account and then try to print out the PDFs using Preview. If it’s still printing them out weird, then it’s definitely Preview vs. Acrobat Reader. If they do print out fine, then there are some corrupted preferences holding the show up. A lot of times, I have found corrupted preferences to be the underlying issue on things like this as well. You might give it a try and see what happens…

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Answer 6

svkrzn Author

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75 points

Aug 7, 2016 11:25 PM in response to andrew_clark

Same thing on the new account. I think the only thing I need to try out is a completely different computer with the same OS. This way I'll know if it's El Capitan messing with PDFs or it's just the provider with their PDF maker program.

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Answer 7

Aug 8, 2016 3:46 AM in response to svkrzn

Another option would be to revert to the previous Mac OS (10.10 Yosemite). If you didn't have the issue when running that version it might be worth a try. Although, unless you wipe your startup drive, it may be inconclusive. Do you have another Mac running less than Mac OS 10.11? Either way, like you said, try printing out the problem PDFs with both Preview and Acrobat Reader.

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