Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Preview is a Mess for PDFs...
- Thread starter iBighouse
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I'm not sure there are any options like this for Preview.
Do these files open properly elsewhere?
Try searching for "repair PDF" and choose an option to scan the file and see if it has some anomaly.
Do these files open properly elsewhere?
Try searching for "repair PDF" and choose an option to scan the file and see if it has some anomaly.
The MacOS's Preview has limited support for PDFs, always has. The longest running limitations seem to be related for various font encoding types that are perfectly legit as per the PDF specification but are not supported by Preview. I highly recommend that you use some other PDF viewer if you need to view complex PDFs, particularly any that are created on other OSes. My current choice on MacOSX is Adobe Reader, though on Windows I use Foxit Reader.
I'm guessing that the above responses will whiff...
I'm surmising that you've not generated the PDF files correctly in relation to embedding fonts so that Preview can open and display those fonts properly - Preview does not have the same font substitution options that Adobe's Reader/Acrobat includes, and I'm going to also surmise that Preview could be choking on any SHX files and/or non-native Mac fonts in your exported PDF file.
The Adobe PDF printer uses the "DWG to PDF.pc3" plotter profile, and you'll likely need to tweak it a bit (and maybe stick to a Mac's System Fonts and a different PDF reader application). For the pc3 tweak:
I'm surmising that you've not generated the PDF files correctly in relation to embedding fonts so that Preview can open and display those fonts properly - Preview does not have the same font substitution options that Adobe's Reader/Acrobat includes, and I'm going to also surmise that Preview could be choking on any SHX files and/or non-native Mac fonts in your exported PDF file.
The Adobe PDF printer uses the "DWG to PDF.pc3" plotter profile, and you'll likely need to tweak it a bit (and maybe stick to a Mac's System Fonts and a different PDF reader application). For the pc3 tweak:
- Use the Plotter Manager to open the Plotters folder
- Open the DWG to PDF.pc3 plotter file
- Select the "Device and Document Settings" tab
- Select Custom Properties
- Experiment with "Font Handling" options.