[Tee]

Documents over about 30 pages that I have created using Save As PDF can't be read by Acrobat Reader 5.x

On about the 30th page the text just stops and the remaining pages are blank.

However, Preview can display them.

-Clean install of 10.2.8

-Also happened on 10.2.6

Is this an OS issue or could it be related to my printer driver?
-Brother MFC 5100c v.1.2.5

[Macola]

Try using a standard Postscript printer (virtual printer) like an HP or LaserWriter.

[Tee]

Originally posted by Macola:
Try using a standard Postscript printer (virtual printer) like an HP or LaserWriter.

So, should I just download a random HP printer driver and use it when I want to print to PDF?

[Macola]

Originally posted by Tee:
So, should I just download a random HP printer driver and use it when I want to print to PDF?

You don't even need to download one. Just set up an IP printer in Print Center (or Print Setup Utility in Panther), and select one of the HP Postscript models that come with OS X. You can just use "localhost" for the hostname or make up an IP address.

[Tee]

Originally posted by Macola:
You don't even need to download one. Just set up an IP printer in Print Center (or Print Setup Utility in Panther), and select one of the HP Postscript models that come with OS X. You can just use "localhost" for the hostname or make up an IP address.

I get it.
Thanks!
I will try that.

[brachiator]

I used to have an IP printer setup like you describe, in Jag, but after cleanly installing to Panther I have been to lazy to reset that and have just been using the "Save as PDF" function.

What are the relative merits/drawbacks of each method? The "Saved as" PDFs seem fine.


Thanks!

[Tee]

Still no luck.

I can't save as PDF and have the resulting file readable by Acrobat Reader...

[SMacTech]

Is there possibly a font, EPS file, or graphic that is in the document and is causing Acrobat Reader to stumble?
Having worked with Acrobat, quite a bit, I have seen a lot of documents that it would not render in various acrobat reader version. There is also some compatibility issues between them too.

[Tee]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Is there possibly a font, EPS file, or graphic that is in the document and is causing Acrobat Reader to stumble?

I don't think so.
It happens even with plain text documents.

It is very odd.
At about the 20th or 30th page the text becomes garbled and then the remaining pages show up as blank in Acrobat Reader.

The files can be read in Preview, but this means that I can't share the files with OS9 users...

This happened in 10.2.6 and also with a clean install of 10.2.8.

[SuperHard]

I hadn't noticed this problem before so I tried the following: I have a 37page MS Word document, full of imported images, text, and references. I used OS X "save as pdf" option that comes up when you "print" a file. I can open the pdf just fine in Preview and Acrobat Reader 6.0, but Reader 5.0.5 couldn't even open the first page.
I am running X.3.2.

Maybe that will give you a clue.

[Tee]

Originally posted by SuperHard:
I hadn't noticed this problem before so I tried the following: I have a 37page MS Word document, full of imported images, text, and references. I used OS X "save as pdf" option that comes up when you "print" a file. I can open the pdf just fine in Preview and Acrobat Reader 6.0, but Reader 5.0.5 couldn't even open the first page.
I am running X.3.2.

Maybe that will give you a clue.

Sounds like files produced with Save as PDF can only be viewed by Preview or Acrobat Reader 6.

That means that I can't view these files on an OS9 machine since Acrobat Reader 6 is OS X only.

In my opinion this is lame...

[Macola]

Originally posted by Tee:
Sounds like files produced with Save as PDF can only be viewed by Preview or Acrobat Reader 6.

No, I can open them fine in Acrobat 5.0.5 (both in Panther and OS 9). I never bothered to upgrade to Acrobat 6 because it seemed like such a buggy piece of cr*p when it came out...

[Tee]

Originally posted by Macola:
No, I can open them fine in Acrobat 5.0.5 (both in Panther and OS 9). I never bothered to upgrade to Acrobat 6 because it seemed like such a buggy piece of cr*p when it came out...

Can I send you a PDF and see if you can view it?

[Tee]

Here is a direct link to a PDF that I made with Save As PDF under 10.2.8

The file is about 170K
It is 49 pages.

When viewed with Acrobat Reader 5.05 it becomes garbled at the 25th page and then the remaining pages are blank.

test.pdf
Post edited Feb 9, 2004 - link to file removed.

[Saddam H.]

hmm. I am running 10.3.2 and Acrobat Reader 6. Like you write, your pdf does not display in Reader beyond a certain page number; however, it displays perfectly in Preview.

[Macola]

Very strange--same results here. It cuts out halfway through page 25 in Acrobat 5.0.5 (in 10.3.2) but is fine in Preview.

[Saddam H.]

Originally posted by Tee:
Here is a direct link to a PDF that I made with Save As PDF under 10.2.8

The file is about 170K
It is 49 pages.

When viewed with Acrobat Reader 5.05 it becomes garbled at the 25th page and then the remaining pages are blank.

http://www.dialnine.com/two/test.pdf

Can you point us to the source of that pdf? I'll make it myself and see how it comes out.

[Tee]

Originally posted by Saddam H.:
Can you point us to the source of that pdf? I'll make it myself and see how it comes out.

It's a text file that I 'printed as PDF' from Safari in 10.2.8

However, this problem is not unique to this particular document, it happens with every long document that I attempt to Save As PDF in any application in 10.2.6 and 10.2.8

http://cryptome.org/doa011204.txt

[Saddam H.]

crap, I have the same problem. Preview displays fine, but Acrobat 6 displays no text after page 27.

[manfreds]

The problem is that you are running against a so called "implementation limit" of the viewer application. What happens is that the creating application has a single view that is offset and then clipped for each page. After a certain page the offset becomes to large for the viewer application and the page is not displayed correctly any more.

Different viewer applications may have different implementation limits. A PDF is not out of spec if it exceeds an implementation limit of Adobe Reader, but it's not a wise thing to do either.

(I'm not 100% sure this is the correct answer, but unless anybody has a better explanation, this sounds good enough)

[SuperHard]

To pursue this curiosity a bit further, I downloaded your test pdf and got the same result others got: neither Acrobat 5.0.5 or 6.0 could display anything beyond page 25. However, earlier I converted a 37page word doc into a pdf (using OS X.3.2 Print>Save As PDF) and Acrobat 6.0 could display all 37 pages.
I thought there might be a difference between X.3 and X.2 in how they "save as pdf".
So I opened your test pdf in Preview, and Saved it as a PDF (again) = test2.pdf.
Unfortunately that did not change the outcome. In Acrobat 6.0 and 5.0.5 neither could display anything beyond pg 25.

I think Manfreds explanation makes a lot of sense, but it is hard to predict how large file can be converted to pdf through OS X Print feature and have Acrobat open it.

I wonder if Acrobat could display all the contents if you split your RTF document to make two pdf's and then use something like "CombinePDF" (see version tracker) to rebuild them into a single pdf.

[Tee]

Originally posted by manfreds:
The problem is that you are running against a so called "implementation limit" of the viewer application. What happens is that the creating application has a single view that is offset and then clipped for each page. After a certain page the offset becomes to large for the viewer application and the page is not displayed correctly any more.

Different viewer applications may have different implementation limits. A PDF is not out of spec if it exceeds an implementation limit of Adobe Reader, but it's not a wise thing to do either.

(I'm not 100% sure this is the correct answer, but unless anybody has a better explanation, this sounds good enough)

I am not smart enough to understand what all that means.

I just wish that OS X made PDF's that I could view on OS9 without having to worry about the length of the document.

[SuperHard]

It would be nice to be able to correlate pdf file size with compatability in Acrobat.

Unfortunately its not that simple, so far. Tee's pdf is only 168KB (although when I Printed it as pdf again, it became 1 MB using x.3.2) and whether its printed in x.2 or x.3 Acrobat can't display beyond page 25.

When I printed directly from the webpage, same problem, though it was garbled at the bottom of page 26.
If I copy and paste all the text into TextEdit, and then print from there, same problem.

I made my pdf from a 37 pg word document, that resulted in a 2.8MB file (contains lots of embedded images). In this case, Acrobat 6.0 could display all 37 pages. So file size, per se, isn't a good predictor of compatabiity.

Rather annoying. And I realize none of this helps you make your pdf compatible with acrobat 5.0.x.

All I can think to do is to check Version tracker for someother utility to make pdf's. I'm sure there are some good ones for a lot less than buying "Reader".

Good luck. If you figure something out, please post it.

[Moonray]

Wouldn't it be on Apple to make their pdfs compatible with the most used reader or is it again that they have to go an own way?

-

[chabig]

No. Apple should make their PDFs conform to the PDF specification.

[Moonray]

And the PDF specification is done by Adobe and I just think their own reader would follow their own specification, so if there are undefined application limits as pointed out by Manfred then Apple can stick to Adobe's PDF specification and make the PDFs Acrobat reader compatible, or am I missing something?

-

[manfreds]

The PDF specification just says things like "blablaba is a number", but it doesn't say how large or small this number can be.

The implementation limits of Adobe (Acrobat) Reader are documented in an appendix of the PDF specification. But that doesn't mean that all viewers or PDF creators have to obey these limits. It might well be possible that Adobe Reader compiled for a 64 bit system has wider limits for example.

I looked it up, and the limit for real numbers is +/- 32,767. If you assume a page height of around 700 points that's only about half of that at page 25, so I might be wrong here actually. But if I'm right, the application that creates a PDF by shifting a giant single view is more to blame than Quartz. The generated PDF is a valid PDF after all, it's just not viewable in Reader.

Out of curiosity, if you hold down the option key in OmniWeb, Save As becomes Save AS PDF and saves a PDF as a single page the size of the whole HTML document. How does that look like in Adobe Reader?

[Love Calm Quiet]

Clarification request:

Are you sure this happens only with pdfs made by "Save as PDF" ?

If it's a limitation of Acrobat Reader... then shouldn't there be trouble reading pdfs produced by Acrobat as well (if they exceed the 25 or 30 or whatever limit)? Or am I missing something?

[PubGuy]

In OSX 10.2, I believe the recommended way of creating the PDF file was to hit File-Print from your application, then on the print dialog select "Preview" (and not "Save as PDF), then while the document is in Preview, you would select SAVE.

In OSX 10.3, you can safely do the File-Print, and then select the "Save as PDF: from the print dialog.

[Tee]

Originally posted by PubGuy:
In OSX 10.2, I believe the recommended way of creating the PDF file was to hit File-Print from your application, then on the print dialog select "Preview" (and not "Save as PDF), then while the document is in Preview, you would select SAVE.

In OSX 10.3, you can safely do the File-Print, and then select the "Save as PDF: from the print dialog.

Thanks for the tip.

Unfortunately, the result is still the same...

[allformac]

So has anybody else tried to create a pdf file above 25 pages (different from this users file) and have it successfully opened in Acrobat reader?

I am almost certain that I have been sent pdf files created using the "save as PDF" that were above 25 pages and I viewed them perfectly in Acrobat.

Mike

[chabig]

I just saved a 50 page PDF file from TextEdit and it opened OK in Adobe Reader. I tried it twice, once with Preview, and once with Save As PDF.

Chris

[Tee]

Originally posted by chabig:
I just saved a 50 page PDF file from TextEdit and it opened OK in Adobe Reader. I tried it twice, once with Preview, and once with Save As PDF.

Chris

Adobe Reader 6.x, right?

Try it in 5.x - I bet it won't fully display.

[Macola]

Okay, here's some more data:

195 page Word document, with plenty of embedded graphics, file size about 16MB. I did a Save as PDF (in 10.3.2), and the document opened fine in Acrobat 5.0.5 (the full version) as well as Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 and Preview. I don't have Reader 6, as mentioned before.

I can only guess that there is a bug in your Save as PDF process. I should also mention that I've created 300+ page PDFs on a PC and they open fine in Acrobat 5.0.5 on the Mac, so it's not a platform issue, either.

[Tee]

Originally posted by Macola:
Okay, here's some more data:

195 page Word document, with plenty of embedded graphics, file size about 16MB. I did a Save as PDF (in 10.3.2), and the document opened fine in Acrobat 5.0.5 (the full version) as well as Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 and Preview. I don't have Reader 6, as mentioned before.

I can only guess that there is a bug in your Save as PDF process. I should also mention that I've created 300+ page PDFs on a PC and they open fine in Acrobat 5.0.5 on the Mac, so it's not a platform issue, either.

I have some new data too:

The problem does not manifest itself when printing from MSIE 5.x and Tex-Edit Plus. But it does when printing the same file from Safari or Preview.

Perhaps it is a Cocoa vs. Carbon issue?!

Word v.X is Carbon, right - so I wouldn't necessarily expect the problem.

This same PDF issue was also posted by another user in the Apple Panther Discussions, so it probably isn't just Jaguar or just me.

[chabig]

Adobe Reader 6.x, right?

Right. I don't have 5 anymore. Perhaps Tee is right and it's a carbon versus cocoa issue.

Chris

[Tee]

Originally posted by chabig:
Right. I don't have 5 anymore. Perhaps Tee is right and it's a carbon versus cocoa issue.

Chris

At this point I have no idea what the problem is.

Jag vs. Panther
Carbon v. Cocoa
Acrobat 5 v. Acrobat 6
???