OS X :: Preview.app Displays PDFs With Missing Or Distorted Text
Jul 10, 2009
I've been having intermittent problems with the Preview app showing PDF files with either missing text or distorted fonts. The PDFs all display correctly if I use Adobe Acrobat (Reader or Professional). The one I can consistently get to malfunction is the PDF generated by the Postal Service label generator. The barcode always prints incorrectly by Preview, yet if I pull up that very same file in Adobe, it displays and prints just fine.
I seem to be having trouble with large PDFs in OSX. Everytime I open such a PDF file, either under Preview or Adobe Reader, ATSserver and mdworker begin taking up 60-80% of the CPU. Can someone please shed some light into what is happening? I understand that OSX is indexing the PDF file, but it indexes it everytime the PDF is launched, instead of just once. For example, I open Textbook.pdf (50mb) in Preview. As soon as it opens, the above two processes take up 60-80% of the cpu and seemingly dont stop. I wait, and wait, and eventually they do. So then I search for a word in the PDF file, and those processes start up again, searching becomes painfully slow as each instance of the term is searched for (I thought it indexed it). Once the searching for one term is done, and I decide to search for another, the two processes come on again, and everything slows down again. If I close Textbook.pdf and open it again either immediately or at a later date, the same things happen again.
Isnt it supposed to index once, and then be indexed forever? Instead of indexing everytime the pdf is launched, and everytime a term is searched for? This has made large PDFs almost unusable in OSX, unlike in Windows which doesnt seem to have this problem. Is there a solution?
This PDF [URL] Will not load properly, it is all messed up in preview. If I get that same file and drop it into my XP virtual running adobe acrobat, it loads perfectly. Why is this the Case? would this be something Eli Lilly did when they saved the file and it does not open up correctly? All other PDFs from different companies load fine, its this Eli Lilly ones that seem to have this issue. (I am running the latest snow leopard)
I can't seem to merge PDFs in Preview 5.5.1. I've read that you simply open multiple PDFs in the thumbnail and then place one PDF on top of another, but when I try, the two PDFs just wiggle around and change order. If not preview - what program should I use?
Preview has become very slow to load PDFs. This is for any PDF file. It still loads graphics quickly. This problem started a couple of weeks ago. I do not have "Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps" checked in the General pane of System Preferences.
I regualrly have to join several PDF files into one document. They way I am doing this at the moment is through preview i.e. simply dragging and dopping the files over one another in the thumbnail side bar. However, at some point the computer invariably freezes showing me the spinning wheel of death for perhaps 15mins. Some times I cannot revover and have to force a hard reboot. Other times, I can get it to soft reboot after waiting for ages. The funny thing is the resulting file is fine since I can access after it after performing the reboot.Â
why this is and how I can avoid it since it wasts alot of time.Â
Specs of my MacBook are:Processor 2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7
Memory 4GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 I have 600 GB of hard disc space freeÂ
I am running OSX 10.7.3Â
The total size of the documents I want to join amounted to less than 4 Mb so I don't think I should be running out of memory.Â
I have read on a lot of forums that it is possible to merge AND SAVE multi-page pdfs with preview. I can get all of the images I want, but when I go to save as pdf in the print menu, it only shows ONE page. I have seen tutorials online and I have followed them step-by-step (I have Leopard 10.5.6), and simply cannot make this work - it will only save one page.
I have Adobe in my parallels but I absolutely loathe opening it because it brings my computer speed down to a crawl.
Please, if someone knows of a workaround for this, let me know! I am taking tons of screen shots and trying to merge them as pdfs in a quick way so I can send back and forth with my web designer.
Have a Mac Book Pro 5.4 running mac os x 10.6.8. Recently I am unable to open bank statements or other pdf's on the web with preview. Unless I install Adobe Reader all I get is dark black screen. I've tried using Firefox instead of Safari but have the same problem. Somehow a pdf created with Adobe Reader can no longer be opened with preview. I've check and preview is the default app for .pdf files. I tried deleting Adobe Reader for Mac but when I click on the web link preview can't open the document.
Whenever I click on a PDF in my Safari window all I get is a blank screen. For some reason it has stopped opening them in Preview. I need to look at a number of PDF's. If I could download them I would but these links do not give me that option. What do I do?
Last year I could add pdf documents together in Preview to make a compilation that was much easier to print in booklet form as it avoided blank pages. Some time this year the behaviour changed, and now when I drag one open pdf onto the window of another, although on screen they look as if they are now one, even if I highlight each page in the sidebar when I press Print only the first one prints, which is a retrograde step IMO.Â
Is there a way to get the old behaviour back? This was a new feature in Snow Leopard and has been immensely useful to me, significantly increasing my productivity. It also used to be able to save the three pdfs as one file, but this too is no longer possible.Â
Is there a setting I can change in order to allow pdf import again? I can't even import files that last year I successfully imported to make new combined files, so I know it is not the pdf settings on the pdf file, it is definitely something that changed in preview itself in Snow Leopard in early 2012.
Forcing preview to see downloaded pdf's automatically. Safari downloads these but preview doesn't open it unless forced. My other MB air downloads them and automatically opens them in th media viewer of Safari.Â
I just received the 15" MacBook Pro with enhanced resolution screen (not the Retina display). At the highest resolution, all of the fonts display incredibily small. However, the lower resolution options don't seem to match the aspect ratio of the screen and create distortion. I can deal with this on Safari because it allows pinch and zoom resizing. However, I have not figured out how to zoom in on the Mail app. Using Command + is not a good solution because it actually increases the font size that the recipient views. I have to go all the to 30pt font to make it comfortable to view. Also, using Control and two finger swipe to zoom in a poor option as well because not everything will display.Â
My employer sent me a form in .pdf form to fill out and send back. How can I fill out the form in Preview and send it back instead of having to print, complete, scan and re-send the form?
I know there's a way to do this. I want to be more proficient in Preview without having to fire up CS3. I'm going nuts trying to find a decent tutorial online. I found this one but by reading the comments, there seems to be another way.
If I wanted to post on a forum a picture I need to have the image text and use that to insert the image itself. How do I get the image text from iPhoto, Photobooth, and Preview?
Some time ago I learned of a technique to insert text (caption) into the body of a photo. I am pretty sure it used Preview, but I cannot get any further than that. Can someone guide me through that again?
only recently i lost the possibility to play my mp3s neatly by clicking little play icon inside the file icon. i know this depends on the size of icons, but no matter how big my icons are the play button doesn't show.
I want to compress a PDF I have created. I've been told that in Preview, in the Print dialog box, in the PDF menu there is an option "Compress PDF." That option doesn't appear in my dropdown menu. It doesn't appear in that menu regardless of what program I'm selecting Print from. I have a new MacBook Pro I bought last August with the latest version of Lion. How do I get that compression feature to work on my system?
So I use Preview for taking notes in class. I just add text boxes on top of the slides and save it afterwards. It usually works great. But the last few PDFs, even though I type all the text correctly and save it before I close, I will reopen the PDF document later to find that every text box throughout the document has been turned sideways! It's really annoying to have to go back and individually turn the boxes right side up (if I just enlarge the textbox a little, the words align correctly). I'm using a MacBook Pro (pretty new) with Lion OS.
Search results in SL's Preview are not very helpful, because it shows only pages where given word/phrase occurs. I miss the view where the context of the search result was shown. Does anyone know how to get the behaviour of the pre-SL's Preview back?
For a while I can highlight text and mark, etc but after I save the PDF it sometimes no longer allows me to highlight any text, even text I have already highlighted..
Since I have installed SL, when I try to print to PDF from the print menu or save a PDF I'm viewing with Preview (for example) from a website, the text of the PDF is completely garbled/scrambled.
I don't have this problem when I use Acrobat 8 Pro only when I am using the OS PDF or saving and/or printing from Preview. I have cleared the font cache, but no solution.
I have a problem when saving a pdf using preview.Â
I create a document using Xelatex and the document works fine just after it is created, i.e. it looks good, it can be searched, etc. The problem comes when I save the document using preview. For example if I add a note, or highlight something and save the document, it automatically losses all text information.Â
It can still be opened and looks good, but it cannot be searched any more. In addition, if I try to copy a part of the text all I get are some strange characters that look like a small square with a face on it.Â
If I do the same procedure (i.e. open, highlight some text, and save) using pdf acrobat reader, the file is still readable both in acrobat and preview. It has to be fonts related, since it only happens when I use xelatex or latex with some specific fonts, but not with all of them.Â
I frequently use Preview to annotate PDFs and screen shots, and every time I add a text box annotation it is formatted to center the text in the box. Is there any way to change that so that text is aligned with the left side of the box?
Some document (jpgs, pdfs, pngs, docs, gifs) icons in finder do not have previews, regardless of whether or not "display icon preview" is on, and regardless of the state of similar, or even copied versions of the file. Some folders are better/worse than others, and some have complained about problems involving externals, and perhaps permissions?
Additionally, I've had instances when previously previewable files have, over time, lost their previews, sometimes while they've been in a folder I was poking around in. These previews can even go missing in the Cover Flow view and QuickLook, and just show the generic icon picture.
I really don't think this is due to processing power, or taking time/RAM to compile the previews, and I haven't noticed the correlation some have between PC origins and lack of preview.Is there some way to force finder to rebuild it's preview database? Does anyone know what the deal is, or indeed, if there is one?
(I had a look around, and there were a couple o' threads, in this site and others, and an archived support article which didn't really answer it, despite the "answered" tag.)Basically: some docs don't generate previews, or lose the ones that they get, does anyone know why?
i want to open an image or pdf with preview,it loads slowly for the first time while mouse pointer wheeling (like crash time)and the console error is about sandboxing,i think it is created because of update from 10.7.1 to 10.7.3, the console message is
sandboxd[318] ([313]): Preview(313) deny iokit-open AppleGraphicsPolicyClient com.apple.mdworker.isolation.0[322]: warning: invalid bfrange: string length is not a multiple of 2.
i don't know what to do more to solve this problem, i have done reset password,disk utility permissions repair?
I have several PDF docs with several annotations in them. When I show the sidebar in Preview it lists page, type, date, and author, but does not display the words in the annotations!With a long of annotations that only identify themselves by "Text", it's laborious to find the note one is looking for. (One has to manually step through each one at a time!)
Info:MacBook Pro early 2008, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Time for a new computer!
