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Weird PDF rendering problem with new Mac mini

P

pedregosa

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 31, 2010
248
221
Picked up a new Mini yesterday, the base $799 configuration. It was for regular office work. But I've run into a weird bug where some -- but not all -- PDFs render with garbled images and random color in what are black-and-white documents. Example attached. It's not a problem with my LG Ultrafine monitor, as it isn't happening when I attach my MacBook. Not sure whether it's a problem with the Mini itself or with PDF Expert on the Mini. But too big a bug for my workflow, as I work with PDFs all the time and have had no problem with PDF Expert on my MacBook. So I guess Mini going back. Mini seemed fine in other respects.
 

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Try either Preview or Adobe Reader/Acrobat. If t it renders OK with Preview or Adobe, then the issue, imho, is PDF Expert and not the Mini itself.
 
pedregosa said:
Picked up a new Mini yesterday, the base $700 configuration. It was for regular office work. But I've run into a weird bug where some -- but not all -- PDFs render with garbled images and random color in what are black-and-white documents. Example attached. It's not a problem with my LG Ultrafine monitor, as it isn't happening when I attach my MacBook. Not sure whether it's a problem with the Mini itself or with PDF Expert on the Mini. But too big a bug for my workflow, as I work with PDFs all the time and have had no problem with PDF Expert on my MacBook. So I guess Mini going back. Mini seemed fine in other respects.
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I have the exact same problem. Doubt its an issue with the Mini, rather with PDF Expert and its underlying graphics engine. Hope it gets fixed soon.
 
I have some PDF magazines in iBooks (I guess thats called Books now) and noticed this morning a few them have entirely disappearing content inside. It's like someone went in and deleted elements of the page. Anything from text boxes to full screen images.

It must be an issue with the underlying PDF engine happens on all iOS 12.1 devices and my MacBook Pro 2016 running 10.14.1 but not my old MacBook Pro 2012 on High Sierra. That displays the same pdfs perfectly.

I'm trying to find out if there's a known PDF bug in 10.14.1 / iOS 12.1 but this forum thread is all I found so far.
 
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You can still contact them, just select the option “I recently bought a Apple product or MacOS” or something like that.
 
gigatoaster said:
You can still contact them, just select the option “I recently bought a Apple product or MacOS” or something like that.
Click to expand...

It seems to be a well known bug in various versions of both Mac and iOS since Apple rewrote the pdf engine from scratch. I’m not sure what Apple telephone support can do exactly.
 
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chabig said:
Returning a machine because an app isn’t working is beyond stupid.
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No. The same version of the same app works fine on my other Mac OS devices running the same OS version. Working with PDFs is central to my workflow. While I could have usd a new Mini right now, I have other devices. I do not want to deal with troubleshooting this and based on 25+ years of owning Macs, I think it highly unlikely that tech support, etc., could resolve this. No doubt it will be resolved in time through updates, but I have zero tolerance for devices that don’t function properly for my workflow out of the box.
 
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Follow up. I downloaded adobe reader and the two problem magazine pdfs that I know of display fine with that.

So I spent the last few hours with those PDFs open in preview on my old MacBook Pro running High Sierra exporting each page as a jpeg (batch exporting didn’t work). Then joining those jpegs together and making a new pdf. The new pdf I made displays fine on macOS 10.14.1 and iOS 12.1 in books.

I’ve saved the original version and I’ll have to check it after the next point update for each platform to see if it’s fixed.
 
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