Acrobat ClearScan + Preview.app

Hello all,
I am using Adobe Acrobat X to vectorize characters in scanned books with Adobe's ClearScan technology which produces a custom font set for each PDF.
ClearScanned PDFs are greatly beautiful and light, and Preview.app can open them properly. However, when I save the PDFs after putting some comments in them, the text of PDFs become non-searchble.
Does anyone know how to avoid this problem?

Hi Akira,
I do have the same problem and did some research through various message boards. Apparently Apple's Preview viewer deletes the non-system font information that is put in the PDF file by Acrobat while doing a 'Clearscan'. So as soon as you save the file using Preview, you unknowingly delete all the information on the text 'behind' the visible characters. This is a huge issue for me as I highlight through a lot of PDF documents which I receive from various sources and many of the older documents are scanned using Acrobat's Clearscan feature to restore smooth fonts and drastically reduce the size of the documents.
One solution is to stop using Apple's Preview tool and use another tool. Some have mentioned that Skim provides annotations in a different file without affecting the source PDF. Another solution if you have access to Acrobat (for which there is a 30 day trial option) is to save the document to a TIFF image file and then re-OCR the file using the 'retain image' option. The disadvantage is that this file will be much bigger and slower to scroll if you want reasonably smooth text. If you do this, you should set the properties for output to TIFF and convert to PDF options to use 600dpi (or at least 300dpi) and use lossless compression on images so that your text stays nice looking. If you ensure that your TIFF output is in black-and-white the file shouldn't be ridiculously large.
Hopefully they will fix that problem with Preview soon. The improvements made to the highlighting feature of Preview made an essential tool for my daily work and that of many other academics.

Similar Messages

Preview.App does not find text in pure text pdf works in other PDF viewers

Hi I am using reportlab an open source python based pdf generating package to generate pdf reports.
The generated pdfs are searchable using Adobe acrobat and Google -Gmails built in pdf viewer . However in Preview.App the text seems to be only recognized as individual characters . For eg the text "hello world" will not match hello or world , but typing just h into the search bar will show up matched text as "h el l o" . So although visibly the text appears as a single word , semantically the words just seem to be composed of one or two characters.
Only Preview.App seems to have a problem with the generated pdf. Adobe Acrobat ( Mac and Windows) , Google-Gmail pdf-view , Evince-Gnome-PDF viewer ( Linux) dont have any problem with finding the text in the PDF documents generated.
I have a thread in the reportlab user forum discussing the issue (see http://two.pairlist.net/pipermail/reportlab-users/2009-August/008643.html). ANd the problem definitely seems to be with Preview.App . The pdf (sample see example text in corner) is available at this url ( http://s3.amazonaws.com/code-itch/searchtext.pdf)
The app is targeted at scientist Mac users . And I want to have the pdf reports searchable and indexed by spotlight , so getting this working is very important for me.
Your help is greatly appreciated
Hari

The posts on the reportlab newsgroup suggest that
"> If the preview is actually rendering the pdf and then searching, the 0
degrees case should be searchable. If that's the way the search is happening
then it's no surprise that the search should fail if the rendered letters
are at 90deg." -Robin Becker
Test cases show that search fails completely at rotations of 90 , succeed partially at rotations of 45, succeed fully at rotations of 0.
So , is there a way to prevent Preview from only searching the final rendered PDF. The pdf I am complaining about are searched fine in the many other PDF readers I tested that probably handle search differently.
Hari

Preview app not working in Leopard

Hi pals,
I have just upgraded my Macbook (Tiger) to Leopard and updated with all necessary patches (10.5.2), but i am not able to launch preview which resulted in not able to launch all pictures and pdfs. When i double click on Preview (through Appln > Preview.app) the icon comes out and go immediately! Is there anywhere i can download preview from apple's site??? How do i repair it?
Please help!!
Thanks pals

Unfortunately, yes it is a clue. The nib file in question is here:
"/Applications/Preview.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/MainMenu.nib"
As you can see, it is buried deep inside the application, that particular nib file is the programming stuff that tells Preview how to draw its menu. If that is broken, obviously the program can't run. And if that is broken, one wonders what else may be wrong. You really need the Leopard install disk so you can get an unbroken version of the program. Meantime, you can try other programs to look at things. For instance, almost anything will open a jpeg, including your browser. The browser will also open lots of other graphics, such as gifs and pngs. You can open PDF files with Adobe Acrobat Reader (free download from Adobe), or even QuickTime Player (believe it or not). Indeed, QT Player will also open pretty much any graphic file, including Photoshop files. I suspect you can use it to view pretty much anything that Preview will open.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Preview.app increases PDF file size.

When making changes to a PDF (in my case, creating annotations), Preview.app will increase the file size of a PDF if that PDF was run through Acrobat Pro's "Reduce File Size" process. For example, I have a PDF that I created using a Book2Net book scanner. I then used Acrobat Pro 10 to OCR the file, then ran Reduce File size which shrank the file size from almost 1.6gb down to about 62mb. If I use Preview.app to make an annotation and then save the file, Preview.app will inflate the file back up to 1.6gb.
An earlier thread (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1478588?start=0&tstart=0) also discusses a similar issue. I'm not sure if those folks were also working with PDFs that were reduced in size by Acrobat Pro or not.
Anyone else have this issue?
10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro.

That is not normal. same action with acrobat and skim do not do this. Changing file size from 170mb to 780mb (my case) should not be expected.
Preview re-formats the file (which takes a while the first "save"). It may even make scrolling and searching for text faster, but is not desirable all the time.
There is NO explanation from Apple in help or online. Keeping things simple is one thing, having unexpected and unexplained behavior is another.
Last preview update made it pretty much useless for annotations anyways.
Choosing "text" annotation used to allow for clicking anywhere on the pdf and start typing. Now, it automatically creates a text box at the center of page that has to be the dragged (and make sure not dragging other annotations with it). click T multiple times, multiple text boxes on top of each other.
I never thought I would look at Windows users with jealousy. What a bad job they are doing.

Preview.app will not display some PDF files

Since upgrading Yosemite I have found that Preview.app will not display some PDF documents, the documents open but all the pages are blank. This is a big issue as my work involves reviewing documents that are all in the PDF format. Strangely some PDFs work properly but I haven't been able to determine any common factors among the documents that work versus those that don't work. The problem documents do open correctly in Adobe Acrobat Reader but Reader takes over viewing of PDF container fields I have in several important FileMaker Pro 13 databases. Acrobat in the FileMaker databases for me is just as much of a problem as not viewing PDFs in Preview.
After searching the forums I followed suggestion in a post to try using version 7.0 of Preview.app (the version that worked under Mavericks) but that is also showing blank pages. I have noticed that the PDFs which open as blank pages also display that way in Finder and Spotlight previews. Could this mean that I have some kind of OS level issue here and not a Preview.app issue? Perhaps Finder and Spotlight use Preview.app to generate the preview.
I have posted this in a bug report to Apple but in the meantime I would welcome any suggestions or workarounds to try.

The built-in PDF renderer has trouble with that file. You might get better results with Adobe Reader.

Preview App using odd fonts...

Hi,
When I view some PDFs (notably ones generated by websites - like a Skype Invoice) Preview App displays some of the text using a horible font that looks a bit like 'Impact' - Opening the same PDFs in Acrobat shows them as they should look - with a nice font like Arial or Helvetica or some such.
Any clues as to how to fix this?
See my example screenshots here:
http://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/Picture 4.png (Preview)
http://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/Picture 5.png (Acrobat)
Pdf is here:
http://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/invoice.pdf
Thanks,
Guy

Not sure how to fix the issue - something to do with the font cache I would think - but your post needs a tiny bit of help. when posting a URL with a space in the name you either need to enclose the whole thing in brackets or use html tags (or if it is just a single one replace the space with %20, like so:
<http://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/Picture 4.png>
<href a="://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/Picture 4.png">http://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/Picture 4.png</href>
http://www.itsnotallwork.com/dl/Picture%204.png

Preview App Seems Gimped in Snow Leopard

I opened a PDF to crop some parts of the file and there are two big issues:
1. I cannot crop multiple pages anymore. There just isn't that option in Inspector or anywhere else. I can only crop one page at a time.
2. Not only can I not crop more than one page at a time, but cropping doesn't actually delete the date. I can go to "View | PDF Display | Crop Box" and see what I just cropped!
Is there anything I can do about this?
Thanks!

I just tripped over problem #1 myself: the ability to crop all the pages of a PDF really does seem to have been removed from Preview in 10.6! I have Acrobat Pro, but Preview's crop was always more convenient to use, up until now. I even tried copying over Leopard's Preview app from my other Mac to use in Snow Leopard, but it doesn't even let you launch it. I assume they changed things under the hood that require the new version, but I can't imagine that this made it impossible to crop. Maybe they just neglected to re-activate that feature for the initial release..?
Anyway I'd send Apple feedback about this:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
As for problem #2: Actually PDFs have always had that sort of "soft cropping" done to them. Leopard's Preview has the same Crop Box/Media Box menu. You've never really been able to hard-crop PDFs -- even Acrobat Pro just soft-crops. If you really need to reduce a PDF's file size (for putting on a mobile device with limited memory for instance), you can soft-crop, then use OS X's Print to PDF feature to force it to make a new PDF with those proportions. I'm not sure if you'd lose any advanced PDF features like table of contents and annotations if you do that, though.
Hope that helps!
Edit: Until this gets fixed, I'd suggest using Skim http://skim-app.sourceforge.net as a good PDF viewer that can still crop normally under Snow Leopard.
Message was edited by: Pres Nevins

Preview App Saved State Removal Doesn't Work

I'm having trouble with my Preview App in Mavericks. I evidently had too many windows opewn and it became unresponsive, so I had to use Force Quit. Relaunching opened all the previous windows and the problem was repeated. After searching the Communities, I learned that the Saved State folder for Preview should be deleted. Then, I couldn't find the Saved State folder, and, after more time searching, I learned it's hidden in Library of the Go menu (Thanks a lot, Apple). I trashed the Saved State folder for Preview, but nothing changed: It STILL opens up all the previous windows. I can't even wrap my brain around how this is possible!
The machine is a 2010 Mac Pro running Mavericks 10.9.1
Any help would be appreciated.

Richard Benson2 wrote:
Edit: I should have said "Zoom to Fit doesn't work as expected"
I was hoping to use Preview as a proper replacement for Acrobat but this is really aggravating. The zoom to fit only seems to use the horizontal Preview document space to determine the viewed file's fitment. Which of course is useless if you want to view the whole file in totality at the maximum space available. I simply want 100% of the viewable document area to maximize to the given space, not just 100% horizontal. As it stands there doesn't seem to be a way to do that other than using the scale field and just trial and error the percentage until you get the result...
Any tips, tricks, workarounds?
Message was edited by: Richard Benson2 for clarity
I have had the same issue for over a year, and it's very aggravating, as I used to use it all the time, and still need to, but it just won't work. It will work if an image is too large, but not when it's too small, and it take multiple "zoom ins", and then you can't get it to fit right! I don't know Apple hasn't fixed this key flaw.... No OS update yet, has fixed it.

Preview.app's "Mail Document" & Entourage?

Preview.app's "Mail Document" & Entourage?
Has anyone noticed that Apple's Preview.app will allow you to email a PDF as an attachment, but it will only work with Apple's Mail.app. Of course I don't use Mail.app, I use Entourage 2008 (Exchange client etc). My OS and Mail.app all agree that my default email application is Entourage 2008, not Mail.app. But Preview.app won't play along.
Has anyone else noticed this undocumented limitation?
I love Preview, and I'm glad I don't have to jack with Acrobat Reader, er, Adobe Reader, anymore (at least for basic PDF functionality).
I cracked open Preview.app's plist preference files hoping to find a "mail with..." value that could be tweaked. No luck.

Agreed - this is annoying. I just toyed around with this program (http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/) but couldn't find any obvious/easy fix.
This is one area where Windows, dare I say it, does better, but only if the application author has coded a File, Send To.. menu item. I get the feeling that the OS X "Services" menu can be set up to do this using an Applescript but I don't know how.
Would be really good if there was a fix for this - I'm an Exchange/Entourage user so have very little choice.
regards
Ash

Preview app doesn't display hyperlinks

PDFs when opened in Apple's Preview App do not work with hyperlinks (including mailto:s). We've tried with various work flows from both windows apps, Apple's 'print pdf', Acrobat Pro. Other apps work fine: e.g. Adobe Reader, Safari.
I'm surprised not to see more discussion about this, is it a well known issue?
CM

Hyperlinks in PDFs that I create in Adobe InDesign work fine in Preview, assuming they were actually created as hyperlinks (versus text strings even with link-like formatting).
Some other apps try harder to interpret text strings as hyperlinks than Preview does.

Embedded fonts not displaying in Preview.app

I occasionally get PDF documents with embedded fonts in them. They look fine in Adobe Acrobat, but opening them in Preview.app makes the system fall back to some ugly default font.
I keep a copy of Acrobat reader laying around pretty much only so I can open these files. This behavior is consistent across computers and has been occurring on OSX for ages. I can provide an example PDF is anyone who knows about these things would like to take a look at it.
Any thoughts on the matter?

Check out this thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/click.jspa?searchID=4541194&messageID=5729015

Can I create a working preview app without creating a certificate etc?

All I need to do is create a working preview app for one tablet (Android - Galaxy 10.1) to be viewed as a company presentation only on that one tablet. It's an 80 page InDesign document with interactivity, hyperlinks, video, and I'm wondering if I have to go through the whole process of registering, certificates etc. just to do this?

You have to create an Adobe ID and connect it to DPS here https://digitalpublishing.acrobat.com/welcome.html.
Then you'll sign into the Folio Build in InDesign with those credentials and upload the folio to the Distribution Server.
Then you'll use the same credentials to sign into the Adobe Content Viewer. After signing in, your folio that you uploaded will be available to download.

Preview app frozen

I'm seeing a weird problem with the Preview app. Working with a lot of PDF documents recently has seemed to cause preview to become slow and unresponsive whereas previously this was my go to app since Acrobat has always been a bit laggy. Presently, the app is in a state that can best be described as frozen (not crashed).
Switching to the app changes the open PDF to a grey tint with a spinning gear over it. The dock and Activity Monitor indicate the app is not unresponsive but what is even stranger in Activity Monitor it shows almost no CPU or memory usage (I have never seen an app says its using 8 KB memory). A sample of the process shows a remarkably short report:
Sample of Preview
Sampling process 3445 for 3 seconds with 1 millisecond of run time between samples
Sampling completed, processing symbols...
Analysis of sampling Preview (pid 3445) every 1 millisecond
Process:         Preview [3445]
Path:            /Applications/Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/Preview
Load Address:    0
Identifier:      com.apple.Preview
Version:         5.5.1 (719.11)
Build Info:      Preview-719011000000000~1
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [142]
Date/Time:       2012-01-02 21:33:15.836 -0400
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74)
Report Version: 7
Call graph:
    2886 Thread_819969: Main Thread   DispatchQueue_<multiple>
      2886 _dyld_start (in dyld) + 0 [0x7fff618ba028]
Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
        _dyld_start (in dyld)        2886
Binary Images:
    0x7fff618b9000 -     0x7fff618edac7 dyld (195.5 - ???) <4A6E2B28-C7A2-3528-ADB7-4076B9836041> /usr/lib/dyld
Sample analysis of process 3445 written to file /dev/stdout
If anyone has any ideas I would be most interested.

Try:
- Reset the iOS device. Nothing will be lost
Reset iOS device: Hold down the On/Off button and the Home button at the same time for at
- Reset all settings Already sugested
Go to Settings > General > Reset and tap Reset All Settings.
All your preferences and settings are reset. Information (such as contacts and calendars) and media (such as songs and videos) aren’t affected.
- Restore from backup. See:
iOS: How to back up
- Restore to factory settings/new iOS device.
If still problem, make an appointment at the Genius Bar of an Apple store since it appears you have a hardware problem.
Apple Retail Store - Genius Bar

Can't Open iBookm Preview, App Store and other apps after upgrading to mavericks. PELASE HELP!

Well,
I Can't open several apps, as for example, iBooks, Preview, or App Store!
I can't read pdf's or open books, cant's see images or anything that uses preview app.
Can't go to App Store to look for any available update.
Please help!

First attempt a clean install...
http://mashable.com/2013/10/23/clean-install-os-x-mavericks/
If this doesn't work, which it didn't in my case, then download
Pacifist.
http://www.charlessoft.com/
You will need a copy of the Maverick installer.
Use Pacificst to " Open Apple Intallers"
The go to Contents of Mavericks->Contents of EssentialSystemSoftware->Contents of Essentials.pkg->Applications
Then Click on the programs that don't seem to be working and insall. This helped me update certain applications that weren't working such as App Store, Font Book, Mail, and any others.

Preview app: Add text annotation with left justify?

I'm using the Preview app to insert text into some PDF files. I can use the Annotate feature to create a text box in the area I need it and adjust the font, color, size, etc. The only thing I can't seem to do is set the justification to Left Justify. It will show text as center justify - anyone know how to change this?

I can find out what the defaults are with:
defaults read com.apple.preview
There are many properties but a TextAligment property is not one of them.
I tried below but they do not work.
defaults write com.apple.preview NSTextAlignment 0
defaults write com.apple.preview PVAnnotationTextAlignment 0
NB: 0 means left alignment
Any idea?
Maybe Apple has to create an text alignment feature for the GUI or provide the property that we can set it from Terminal.

Acrobat ClearScan + Preview.app

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