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MacinTommy · Jan 20, 2010, 07:31 PM

I'm not sure if this is the right forum but... For one of my college courses I am required to download a PDF with questions. The problem, and this is the first time I've run into this problem, is that when I download the PDF it shows up in "preview" and the words are clear. What I mean by clear is that I can copy the pdf and put it in a pages doc and the words show up. Heres the link.
irish_studies

Click the "Daily Dozen" and see if the same happens to you. And I've tried to download it from Chrome, Firefox AND Safari but the problem persists.

chabig · Jan 20, 2010, 08:14 PM

Please clarify what's happening. I didn't see a problem description. You said it opens just fine in Preview (the words are clear). The specific file you mentioned opens fine for me too. I can also copy and paste into Pages just fine. And I can drag the pdf into Pages as an image. No problem at all.

Oisín · Jan 20, 2010, 08:15 PM

Yeah, there’s something buggered in that PDF file, all right.

Open it in Adobe Acrobat (Viewer) and it’ll be fine. Screwed up in Preview, though (on my Tiger machine here, everything is just little squares with question marks in them).

Edit: chabig, I think he means by ‘clear’ that the words don’t show up for him at all. Probably due to the Preview PDF bugs present in Tiger (but mostly solved in Leopard and Snow Leopard—I presume the OP is on Tiger, too).

CharlesS · Jan 20, 2010, 08:18 PM

Looks fine in my Preview (Snow Leopard).

chabig · Jan 20, 2010, 08:19 PM

Could it be a font issue, then?

Cold Warrior · Jan 20, 2010, 08:24 PM

Fine for me in Snow Leopard's Preview. Font Book lets you check for corrupt fonts or duplicates and remove them.

Art Vandelay · Jan 20, 2010, 08:27 PM

No text visible in Preview on my Mac running 10.6.2. No font problems found.

Art Vandelay · Jan 20, 2010, 09:19 PM

Works fine on my home Mac running 10.6.2. I do have Office and its fonts installed on my work Mac. Maybe one of its fonts is causing a problem.

ghporter · Jan 20, 2010, 09:23 PM

I think it's a font issue. The text area is there, and Preview acts like there is text there (you can highlight the "text" just fine, copy the text and paste it in a document, etc.), but no legible text is visible for me (SL 10.6.2) But it's plain as day with Adobe Reader. Worse, saving the file under another name with Preview generates a file that not only doesn't show text, but isn't at all selectable... Opening it in Gimp allows you to see the text, but opening it with Safari does not.

Now what that font issue is, I don't know. Adobe Reader says the document uses Cambria, Cambria Bold, and Cambria Italic, and those fonts are installed on my machine, but the characters don't show up in Preview.

Thorzdad · 07:31 AM

Shows up blank in Preview for me, but perfectly fine in Acrobat Pro.

The nature of a PDF is that any fonts used are, by default, embedded, so it should display fine whether you have the fonts installed or not. That's a key feature of the portable format. Of course, I have no idea how Preview is geared to handle fonts, so, if the fonts AREN'T embedded in the , I can't say if Preview would act like Acrobat and access the fonts if they are in the system.

Acrobat Pro reports that the base document the PDF was generated from was a Word .docx file from a WinXP machine, and I suspect this is probably at the root of the problem.

FWIW, I've noticed a lot of display bugginess in Preview under SL. Even some jpegs and png files don't display in Preview for whatever reason.

MacinTommy · Jan 25, 2010, 10:06 AM

Ok... thanks for all of the responses. I actually forgot I posted in here because I resolved my issue. I am running Snow Leopard. When I say "clear" I literally mean that the words are clear. I can copy them and paste in word or pages and the words show up but in preview they are invisible. I downloaded Adobe Reader and now the issue is solved. But it still makes me wonder why for some it will show up and for some it won't... Kind of weird.