PDF from scanner works in Acrobat but is blank in Preview

[Rick_Orlina@adobeforums.com]

The subject just about says it all. I'm creating a PDF from Acrobat 6.0.1 Pro, scanning in basic 8-1/2x11" pages using an Epson Perfection 3170 scanner.

When I end the process, a really nice PDF document opens up in Acrobat. File size and print quality are both fine for my needs. But when I open the document in Preview (version 2.1.0) in Mac OS X (still running 10.3.2 because a prior attempt to update to 10.3.3 nuked my system), the document is blank. The weird thing is that it's not completely blank. Shadows and smudges from the original document appear in the PDF when viewed in Preview but all of the text is gone.

I'm sure there's a simple solution and I'm suffering from new-user-itis. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

- Rick

[Rick_Orlina@adobeforums.com]

Not sure whether this is the best solution, but things seems to work if I:

(1) Open the aforementioned document in Acrobat 6 Pro.

(2) Select "PDF Optimizer" from the "Advanced" menu.

(3) Apply these optimizer settings (with all others as they were offered by default):

- Deselect any Image options for color or grayscale, since I scanned a monochrome document
- Change monochrome image compression from CCITT Group 3/4 to ZIP
- Select "Remove hidden layer content and flatten layers" from the "Clean Up" options.

After optimizing, the document opens fine in Preview. Not entirely sure why, but clearly it's either the ZIP compression or the layer flattening. If anyone knows of any reason why this might not be the ideal or most reliable solution, please let me know. Thanks.

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Rick,

Adobe Acrobat is an Adobe issue - Preview is an Apple issue ...

Jon

[Rick_Orlina@adobeforums.com]

I suppose that's true. However, PDF files, which Adobe claims are "a reliable format for electronic document exchange that preserves document integrity so files can be viewed and printed on a variety of platforms," should be an issue for both. In particular, from my perspective, Acrobat Pro is a publishing application. If it fails to publish files that live up to the claim of platform portability, including platforms that may use alternative PDF viewers, then it's an Acrobat issue. It should be possible to diagnose and understand what is going on in the Acrobat publishing environment to affect the desired outcome -- a PDF file that can be viewed by users whose viewing environment is out of my control.

There are a lot of options to choose from in Acrobat Pro when publishing PDFs. I would have though this "Acrobat Macintosh" forum was the place to understand how different combinations of those options might impact PDF compatibility with something like Preview (in which, after four years and countless PDFs on OS X, I have never observed the symptom that I reported earlier today). If that's not the case, I apologize for going off topic.

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Rick,

I understand your issues - but most of the regulars here (me included)
do not use Preview ... we use a more robust method of viewing a file -
Adobe Acrobat. Apple's preview is a good 'skim' PDF preview application
- but it might be classed as not a full 'Reader' only a 'Previewer' ...

Your actions so far have been very pro-active - but please understand
that even if it displays correctly in an Adobe application - then it is
not an obvious Adobe problem....

Jon

[Aandi_Inston@adobeforums.com]

What you are suggesting is that Adobe discover all bugs in non-Adobe
PDF viewers, and carefully produce PDF files that avoid those bugs.
Adobe would emphatically disagree with this, I think (not speaking for
them).

They publish the detailed PDF specification (1000 pages) and it's up
to Apple to do their part of the job.

Aandi Inston

[Rick_Orlina@adobeforums.com]

That's not what I'm suggesting at all. There's a big difference between a bug and a compatibility issue. Adobe continues to add features and extensions to the PDF format, and older versions of Acrobat Reader can't read newer versions of PDF files. I wouldn't suggest that situation represents a bug in, say, Acrobat Reader 4. New files are simply not compatible with the old reader. Of course, for publishers who have reason to believe that their clients are still using Acrobat Reader 4, Adobe offers output options to extend compatibility of the PDF file. That's great. Do they need to add a similar feature so that users can publish a version of PDF specifically for Apple Preview? No, I don't think so.

But, in general, should it be possible for me, as an Acrobat user, to diagnose an observed PDF compatibility issue and potentially address it from inside the publishing environment? Yes, I believe so. If, in this case, it turns out that the answer is that PDFs produced by scanning documents into Acrobat can never be read by Preview, that's fine. But I think I should be able to understand what's happening when I select certain options in Acrobat -- to learn something about the characteristics of the PDF file that I'm producing -- by learning more about the publisher. I'm perfectly willing to accept that Apple is not doing it's job and that Preview is at best a mediocre PDF reader. But if I learn that Preview fails because of an incompatibility with certain types of image compression, then I should be able to ask the question of whether I can adapt my use of Acrobat in response. That's where I believe that the question about how to use Acrobat to publish PDFs comes back here. I don't want Adobe to change the format or worry about Apple, but I would like to understand how to use Acrobat and all its features both in ideal circumstances and in problematic ones.

I didn't post my question here so that Adobe would "fix Apple's bugs" or add a feature to Acrobat called "publish for Apple Preview." If either of those were my goal, I would have contacted Adobe directly rather than posting my question to a users' forum. I was, however, hoping that someone out there who regularly uses Acrobat on the Macintosh platform might have seen a similar symptom and be able to suggest a workaround. I solved the problem entirely within Acrobat, so (a) I am very happy with what Acrobat can do, and (b) I still believe that an Acrobat user forum is a good place for this question.

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Rick,

You might find the Apple forum a better resource. It is highly probably
that users there do have more experience with Preview/Acrobat combined
in any case.

Jon

[Aandi_Inston@adobeforums.com]

Sorry, that was my interpretation of " If it fails to publish files
that live up to the claim of platform portability, including platforms
that may use alternative PDF viewers, then it's an Acrobat issue."

Ok, you want to diagnose the problem. I'm not sure quite how that
would be approached in the general case. The rules of PDF are
documented, and a single file may use hundreds or thousands of
features of PDF. A tool to list them would only be useful to people
already familiar with the internal details of PDF, and there are
developer tools for these people.

However, the specific issue of image formats is a more manageable one.
It may be that your file uses JBIG2 compression, for example. My
company's plug-in Quite A Box Of Tricks can be used to find the
compression used for a particular image. This is a commercial product,
but the free demo has all the information functions.

Aandi Inston