Apple Preview PDF Bug
For a long time I had an ongoing problem optimizing PDFs in CS3 (I believe the problem occurs with CS2 and possibly other versions too). After a file had been optimized it wouldn’t display or print properly from Apple Preview. Elements of the PDF would either be missing or only partially displayed. I found documentation of the bug online but in each case the person said there was no known workaround.
In my case it was happening with sales documents. They had to be optimized because they had to be small enough to send via email or for people to download from our website, so “no known workaround” just wasn’t acceptable.
I spent a few hours playing around with different optimization settings, different ways of saving the files, basically anything I could think of that might possibly have an effect and by not doing a few things, I hit upon a fix:
- Don’t optimize transparency
- Don’t discard unused objects
- Don’t perform a “clean up” on the document
You can still optimize the PDF and reduce the file down to 20-40% of the original size without performing those actions. You’ll retain print quality and the PDF will view and print correctly from Apple Preview.