Gordaen’s Blog

One of the content owners sent me an update to make yesterday. The request was sent via a PDF attached to an email. It looked like he had simply removed some sections, so I went ahead and did the same on our test server and let him know it was complete. Shortly after, he sent me a message saying that I must have missed some of the changes, so he sent me the PDF with sections circled. Each of these sections were where I had removed content per his previous message, I thought his browser must have been using a cached page, so I asked him to do a forced refresh. He reported that it didn’t work and he still was not seeing the changes.

I met him in his office and had him show me the site. It looked exactly as it did on my computer and in the PDF, so I asked him to open the e-mail he had sent to me so we could compare them. He opened the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Professional (one of the most bloated programs in existence). Each of the areas he had circled in red had text added. Apparently the Preview tool does not completely support PDF’s. That’s not really a big deal to me, because I love how fast Preview is, but there wasn’t even an indication that the content was missing. If the program couldn’t interpret part of the content, shouldn’t it at least have a message pop up letting me know?

I searched around online for quite a while and found this in an old Mac Pro News article:

While Apple deserves to be complimented for this powerful little Preview tool, its choice of which PDF specification to support is less praiseworthy. While OS X 10.3 does support PDF up through version 1.4, including transparency, many features of PDF are not directly supported. This means that these functions are not displayed, and they do not appear in the printed PDF either. Missing features include annotation, video, and sound, as well as many functions that are urgently needed by publishers. One looks in vain for support for transfer curves and OPI comments, for example. The settings for the overprinting function are missing, as is support for Illustrator’s overprint mode. Trimbox, artbox, and bleedbox settings are missing, as are references to external files, Xobjects, alternate images, and XML tags. Even the use of JavaScript and form fill-in is missing.

Remember, when working with PDF’s, Preview might be more aptly called Partial-View. I attached a couple of screenshots of the differences: