Black PDF background in Preview ....?

Tech Support
1

I downloaded some fillable PDFs from the Internet. Typed in data, hit “save”, and the PDF suddenly has a black background except for a little slice of each page, which looks normally.

Switched to another tab, and that PDF has the same glitch.

Closing and re-opening the PDF doesn’t help. Out of desperation I rebooted and that seems to have sorted it out - but when I save again it’s back to the black background.

If I go to “Print” the PDF looks correct in the previewer window.

Any ideas? Or should I just be downloading another PDF tool and avoiding Preview? If so, any suggestions?

2

How do the PDF’s do on another system? Do they come out allright there?

3

They come out just fine even on this Mac if I reboot.

I put one of them in iCloud Drive, and it’s just fine on my iPad - but still screwy on my Mac.

4

Same here with a couple of pdf forms. Opening them in another application fixes the problem. I think it works fine in either Skim or PDF Expert.

5

Yet another example that Adobe PDF is not as universal as I would like. Long live plain text (where it can be used).

6

There have been more issues with pdf on the Mac. I think it was Brett Terpstra who had to rewrite a lot of code becuase of a malfunctioning Apple pdf library (sorry, no reference as I couldn’t find it so quickly). The fact that Apple provides the libraries for most pdf applications on the Mac (and iOS etc.) doesn’t make the pdf format bad. If only Apple would adhere to the standard.

7

Adobe’s PDF has a long history and, as with other software, there have been many versions, bugs, and vulnerabilities. Software developers who attempt to align their work to standards know that it is never a simple straight-forward process.

PDF Standards – Planet PDF

… it’s been nothing but standards, standards, standards when it comes to PDF. In fact, there are so many that it’s very easy to lose track of what they are, and why or where you’d bother to use them.

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