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I swear this is true. I updated my laptop to Snow Leopard yesterday. Everything so far has worked fine (thank God), but there's one tiny little problem when I try viewing Pathfinder PDFs. In every case that I've found (looking at random material from the AP, Chronicles, Companion, and Module lines) the "a"s in all of the section headings have vanished (for instance, in the chapter on tieflings in _Bastards of Erebus_, on page 61 there's now a heading that reads "H lf-Fiends nd Tieflings". Do I really care about a few missing vowels? No. But I thought I should point out a possible compatibility problem with something in OS X 6 before a bigger issue arises.
I'm not trying to belittle your situation, but this isn't anything new.
The a's of that font are incompatible (currently) with Ubuntu's Document Viewer, and a few other *nix based systems - including OS X.
I have no suggested fix for you.
I can tell you, that as of the last time this was brought up, Paizo had no plans to look into changing the situation since it isn't on their end.
Maybe this has changed, and we have to wait and see.
Also, you may start to notice the artwork blocking out the text because transparencies don't work so well.
As well as it might happen that images only load half way, or one-quarter.
I'm not trying to belittle your situation, but this isn't anything new.
Like I said, this isn't a "situation", I was just letting someone know what happened. I'm pretty good at functioning in a world without the occasional "a". My concern was that, at some point in the future, there would be a problem with a pdf coming out that would be riddled with problems, and some much-less understanding Mac user would get his panties in a bunch over it. Heaven knows in recent weeks it's been demonstrated that it takes far less than vanishing vowels around here to send someone for the pitchforks and torches.
Is your PDF viewer up to date?
Considering it was part of the updated operating system I installed on the day it was released, I sure as God hope it is.
So I assume that means that it's [...] a Snow Leopard problem
If you look at my original post, that's the conclusion I came to as well. I had no problems viewing anything before the update.
So to recap, I'm just throwing an FYI out to whoever- there may be a compatibility issue with the PDFs and Snow Leopard or the version of Preview it comes with. :)
So to recap, I'm just throwing an FYI out to whoever- there may be a compatibility issue with the PDFs and Snow Leopard or the version of Preview it comes with. :)
Well, that's disappointing. Yes, we've seen this problem before with a particular PDF text-rendering engine for Linux; it didn't like the capital A in one of our fonts. (The embedded font uses CID 0 for that character, which is apparently non-standard behavior.) It took a few months, but the bug was eventually fixed by the developer. Sounds like Preview is having the same problem. It's not a problem in Adobe Reader.
I'm not on Snow Leopard yet, but Gary is; I'll have him confirm and report the bug to Apple.
There's an update available for Snow Leopard. Download it, and like magic all of your "a"s reappear.No they don't. I'm running 10.6.1 and all the 'A's are gone in Preview.
Hmm. Gary's the only one in the office running 10.6.1, and the problem still exists for him.
Those of you who are reporting the problem solved in 10.6.1, is your version of Preview listed as "5.0 (501)", or is it higher?
Bill Faulkner
(Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Adventure Path, Campaign Setting, Companion, Battles Case, GameMastery Maps Subscriber)
The bug is still marked as "open" in Apple's database. I've updated it with a notation that it's not fixed in 10.6.2.
I actually filed an internal bug for this over the summer during the SnowLeopard pre-release testing, when I was working for Apple. They're aware of it, but it didn't seem to get very high priority consideration.
Yep.Version 5.0.2 (504)
But... sadly I noticed that only some of the PDFs were fixed. My PFS scenarios are still missing A's, but my APs and RPG books now have them. Are there two different fonts used?
It's worth noting that Readdle renders the files fairly well on the iPad, but there is some text distortion. I haven't noticed missing A's in the latest downloads, but the letters in some headers seem to rearrange themselves until you zoom in close enough. It's very odd.
Have the fonts changed between the Playtest PDF and Kingmaker?
Yep.Version 5.0.2 (504)
But... sadly I noticed that only some of the PDFs were fixed. My PFS scenarios are still missing A's, but my APs and RPG books now have them. Are there two different fonts used?
It's worth noting that Readdle renders the files fairly well on the iPad, but there is some text distortion. I haven't noticed missing A's in the latest downloads, but the letters in some headers seem to rearrange themselves until you zoom in close enough. It's very odd.
Have the fonts changed between the Playtest PDF and Kingmaker?
They're probably different fonts...
Running 10.6.3, Preview 5.0.2 (504). Still missing As in the Bestiary and Core Rules.My Bestiary looks fine; but some of the section headings in the Core Rules Book are indeed missing capital A's.
Take a look at the Table of Contents in your Bestiary. I'm still missing the A's from "T BLE" and " PPENDIX...". The a's have reappeared in my Bastards of Erebus, however.
Take a look at the Table of Contents in your Bestiary. I'm still missing the A's from "T BLE" and " PPENDIX...". The a's have reappeared in my Bastards of Erebus, however.Running 10.6.3, Preview 5.0.2 (504). Still missing As in the Bestiary and Core Rules.My Bestiary looks fine; but some of the section headings in the Core Rules Book are indeed missing capital A's.
Right, you are. I missed that last night.
Just to bring this back to attention: the upper case A letters of the Jubilee font are still missing, for example in the new APG PDF. This is with Preview version "5.0.2 (504)" on Mac OS X 10.6.4.
Yeah—the earlier reports that Apple fixed the bug in their PDF rendering engine were erroneous. They still need to fix it.
FYI - anyone running Ubuntu linux - the default PDF viewer has this "missing A" font problem, but if you install Acrobat reader, it will display the PDFs properly.
I'm running Gentoo Linux, and in case your viewer under Ubuntu is poppler-based - I use Okular, which is - you might want to update to poppler 0.14.1 to fix the problem.