The Quartz rendering engine has some slight problems with some of the Pathfinder (AP, modules) PDFs.
I understand that you are generating the PDFs using Adobe industry-standard tools, so the problems should be with Quartz. Could I get permission to submit the problematic files to Apple, Inc. technical support so they can get the problems fixed?
Thanks.
Chief Technical Officer
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The Quartz rendering engine has some slight problems with some of the Pathfinder (AP, modules) PDFs.
I understand that you are generating the PDFs using Adobe industry-standard tools, so the problems should be with Quartz. Could I get permission to submit the problematic files to Apple, Inc. technical support so they can get the problems fixed?
Thanks.
Sure... but we're all Mac users too. Admittedly, most of us use Reader 8, not Preview... but what sort of problems are you seeing?
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Preview in Leopard doesn't render pdf's correctly. It makes big boxes around them usually filling them with white or black. Basically killing a mask in an image. It prints the boxes too. I've tried over 20 different pdf's that I have... Preview just isn't working right... Welcome to the Mac Beta Testing Team.
Use Acrobat Reader until it gets fixed. (Read: I haven't figured it out yet either...)
There are problems with the white boxes around elements in Preview as was said before.
There are other problems, like the display boxes background of the Gazetteer not appearing in Preview. Check for example page 26 of the Gazetteer, the box named "Curse of the Darkmoon Vale" doesn't show the background in Preview. It appears in Adobe Reader.
Other minor problem is that the text isn't rendered with sub-pixel antialiasing. But that maybe has to do with some optimizations of the Quartz engine.
At least all of the PDFs are completely readable. In other engines used in Linux systems there are some characters that doesn't appear.
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I checked out my Gazetteer in Preview, and the entire document, including p. 26, shows perfectly.
It makes me think there's a problem in your software. You might try running Disk Utility out of your Utilities Folder. Then verify Permissions and the Disk, and repair if necessary. Then try opening the Gazetteer in Preview again and see if it works.
Some of the problems are pretty subtle. For example, the COCT Player's Guide pdf looked fine to me, but when I compared with my hardcopy I noticed that the background shading was restricted to the left lower quadrant of the pdf. That was actually it for that pdf, everything else was fine.
Maybe you could ask Gary to tweak up a solution for the guys at Apple.
Edit: Haven't noticed any problems with Reader
The permissions mantra doesn't help. I checked it in three different macs, Intel and PowerPC, and it doesn't show the box background in Preview. Maybe it's an issue with Leopard. If it has something to do with Leopard it is a regression and Apple should be notified. I don't have machines running previous versions of the system to check.
Andrew: does the parchment-like box background of the box in the upper left corner of p. 26 of the Gazetteer show in your system?
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Andrew: does the parchment-like box background of the box in the upper left corner of p. 26 of the Gazetteer show in your system?
Well, I'll be...!
You're right!
When compared with my hardcopy Gazetteer, the box is missing and the colors are off.
My apologies for the runaround; I should have compared the two and also paid more attention to what you originally posted.
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Chief Technical Officer
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There are problems with the white boxes around elements in Preview as was said before.
There are other problems, like the display boxes background of the Gazetteer not appearing in Preview. Check for example page 26 of the Gazetteer, the box named "Curse of the Darkmoon Vale" doesn't show the background in Preview. It appears in Adobe Reader.
Hmm. It shows up fine in Preview under 10.4.x, though....
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Hmmm... Adobe 8.0 displays the Gazetteer perfectly. Preview uses 8.0, but doesn't display all the graphics--you can't tell unless you know what you're looking for. Anyway, I don't know how to collect the code to send it in an error pack to Apple, because Preview doesn't recognize that there is and error.
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I just wanted to say, I as well am experiencing problems viewing certain Paizo PDFs properly on Preview, but they work perfectly in Adobe Acrobat. I would post up some images comparisons, but I don't know if I'd be violating copyright issues or what not...
But essentially, I'm getting black or white boxes behind images that essentially cover a lot of the text, making it unreadable.
Preview Version 4.1 (469.2.2)
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional Version 8.1.3
Mac OS X Version 10.5.5
2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
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I can also confirm display problems using a Mac Pro running 10.5.7 and viewing the full (not per chapter) version of Burnt Offerings. Problems are apparent with Preview and Skim but not with Acrobat Reader 9.
I can give examples, screenshots etc. on request and I'm happy report this to Apple as a bug if I can get an ok to send them stuff for debugging purposes.
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Apple licensed a given amount of PDF technology from Adobe. I do believe however that the later versions of Acrobat produce files which are not fully compatible with with that tech and you will need the latest version of Acrobat Reader to view them.
So Apple at the moment may be at a limit as to how compatible Preview can be.
Hopefully if we get the word out Paizo might check the settings that they use to generate the PDFs and adjust them to produce PDF code that is more widely compatible. I suspect that the Adobe default settings are probably chosen to make everything other than Acrobat Reader have problems.
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I noticed some problems a while back with Preview. For one, it just seemed to be slow opening PDFs from Paizo. I downloaded Adobe Reader 9 and was amazed by the difference, especially in speed. It also seems to handle layering a lot better than Preview. And that is what I think Preview has its problem with. Most PDFs I run onto are not layered and so Preview works fine. The Paizo PDFs are more complex than an average PDF so I think that is where Preview starts to fall apart.
Simple fix in my opinion is to download Adobe Reader 9. Wait for Apple to fix Preview with OS 10.6 and then see if it works better.
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Update to Acrobat Reader 9.
Preview doesn't deal well with the paizo pdf's... it's sketchy on when it will work.
Also have your OS and other software updated to current versions. I know Preview was improved at some point and I didn't have the problems as often. (But I use Acrobat for the most part now.)
At least all of the PDFs are completely readable. In other engines used in Linux systems there are some characters that doesn't appear.
Well, it depends on which program you use for Linux. I prefer Evince, but that has problems with Paizo pdfs. I've had the missing characters described above, and I have problems with background images behind text, like the parchment-like graphic behind the ability scores table in the Beta ruleset, or worse, maps will have the text displaying where towns and such are, but the actual map won't show. Xpdf works fine, though, but I don't like the look of the program. So, as a freedom-hater, I use Adobe's Acroread, which I can usually get for just about any distro I use.
Anyway, sorry about the threadjack.
At least all of the PDFs are completely readable. In other engines used in Linux systems there are some characters that doesn't appear.Well, it depends on which program you use for Linux. I prefer Evince, but that has problems with Paizo pdfs....
I've had great luck with the new KDE PDF reader, Okular. If your on Linux, and want your Paizo PDFs to look great (better color rendering than Reader I think), give it a shot. It also supports annotations, which can be useful for DMing.
