PDF's missing a letter

[Uranium Dragon]

Just purchased the PDF of the Core Rule Book and the Conversion file.
So how come the letter "A" is missing from the titles and section headers? Is this meant to be some sort of mine canary - to detect pirated copy?

[Vic Wertz]

Uranium Dragon wrote:

Just purchased the PDF of the Core Rule Book and the Conversion file.

So how come the letter "A" is missing from the titles and section headers? Is this meant to be some sort of mine canary - to detect pirated copy?

If you're using Preview under OS X 10.6, it's a bug in that application. Try Adobe Reader.

If you're using an older PDF viewer on Linux, look for an update—everybody else fixed that bug a while ago.

[Hunterofthedusk]

Funny, I don't have that problem with the core rulebook PDF but I do with the APG final playtest PDF. When I sent the Playtest file to my friend's computer, he was having the same problem.

[Vic Wertz]

Hunterofthedusk wrote:

Funny, I don't have that problem with the core rulebook PDF but I do with the APG final playtest PDF. When I sent the Playtest file to my friend's computer, he was having the same problem.

The APG Final Playtest PDF had other issues, and we could never get a single version that worked perfectly for everyone. If you have problems with it, try repersonalizing and redownloading it—the currently posted version should work for *almost* everyone. (But if you *don't* have problems with it now, don't throw out your old version!)

[Uranium Dragon]

Interesting. Yeah, Acrobat shows all the letters. Wonder if there's a way to fix it so it works ok in (Mac) Preview.

Thanks!

[azhrei_fje]

Uranium Dragon wrote:

Interesting. Yeah, Acrobat shows all the letters. Wonder if there's a way to fix it so it works ok in (Mac) Preview.

While I think the OSX Preview is much better in Snow Leopard, I'm still not happy with it overall (no quick way to jump to a particular page, no way to jump back and forth quickly between two separate pages, weird text copy semantics for some/most/all? PDFs). I typically use Acrobat 8 for copy/pasting images and 9 to just view documents.

[mitenotes]

Vic Wertz wrote:

Uranium Dragon wrote:

Just purchased the PDF of the Core Rule Book and the Conversion file.

So how come the letter "A" is missing from the titles and section headers? Is this meant to be some sort of mine canary - to detect pirated copy?

If you're using Preview under OS X 10.6, it's a bug in that application. Try Adobe Reader.

If you're using an older PDF viewer on Linux, look for an update—everybody else fixed that bug a while ago.

Late to the discussion, but thought I would chime in with some version details on my experience.

Adobe 9.3.3 on Mac OS X (SL, 10.6.4) looks good.
Preview 5.0.2 (504) seems to drop the letter 'A" from titles and section headers.

I am curious what the bug is and if it's something I can hack out of/or into my file, or possibly fix in Mac OS X itself via a preference or other tweak (I'm talented that way and would share). I've noticed the problem also is present in iBooks on my iPhone and it seems to be present across files I own (Core RB and RotRL PG).

[mitenotes]

mitenotes wrote:

I am curious what the bug is ...

It turns out to be a fairly ubiquitous bug that was present in freetype, a *nix library for rendering glyphs defined in a PDF, which I tracked down in several *nix board discussions and specifically located the details from the following post: PDF is missing the letter "A" throughout the document. OK when viewed in Windows.

More, Mac OS X (SL, 10.6) SDKs deliver a freetype version that appears to be 2.0.4. Significantly behind the current version of 2.4.1. It is unclear as to whether Preview uses the freetype library and if so what version.

It might be possible for an enterprising Mac OS X user to recompile Preview against a newer version of freetype... I might just try that... if that is what Preview is using.