Fixing PDFs Whose Pages Render as Black Rectangles
When he sent me the PDF, it opened and displayed fine in Preview on my Mac, running the same versions of macOS and Preview.
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The solution may have been simple, but it was far from obvious. User oakcan reported suffering from the same problem and resolved it by calibrating his display. Chris Lee said that recalibrating the display worked for him too.
The PDF issue I’ve been seeing lately is pages that render as white rectangles, but only intermittently (e.g. after switching back from another app).
Previously: PDFKit Improves Somewhat in High Sierra.
Update (2018-01-30): Dan Masters:
This happens all the time in iBooks – maybe Apple should allow us to recalibrate iOS displays too 😄
Update (2019-01-31): Alas, I’m still seeing the problem with white pages on macOS 10.14.3.
Update (2019-02-01): Friedrich Markgraf:
Had a DHL shipping label PDF. Looked good in Preview, strange artifacts in Chrome, and totally unusable printed from Preview. Had to print a screenshot.
I've seen PDFs that render correctly but print wrong. Converting them to PNG in Preview and printing the PNG works though.
At least the encoding issues that i saw since 10.9 are gone with 10.13.