Known Participant

Question

Issues with PDF produced by macOS Quartz PDFContext

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
November 19, 2023
4 replies
15038 views

I'm using Acrobat Pro on Windows and I'm increasing seeing print issues with files produced by mac users and its always the macOS Quartz PDFContext listed as producer. The files open and preview fine but either cannot print or print absolute garbage.

The majority of the time trying to fix in Illustrator leads to more issues due to missing or transalation of fonts between operating systems. I was under the impression the point of PDF was it's portability.

Is this a known issue and what are the work arounds?

[ Before anyone suggests buying a mac I just don't have that kind of money. But happy to accept donations.. 😉 ]

L

Lenchu

Participant

Hi there, not sure if you figured it out but I ran into the same issue today. What I did was save the offending PDF as postscript using Acrobat then distilling the postscript using Distiller. I used the Press setting. The PDF is now usable. Hope this is helpful if anyone else has the same issue.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Using a script (in an Action) it is possible to detect PDFs created by MacOS PDF Services.

This would certainly be more practical than waiting for errors.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Never open a PDF with Illustrator (or worse, Photoshop), it always does more harm than good.

Acrobat Pro has everything you need and more.
In the Preflight there are dozens of ways to analyze and/or correct PDF files.
If it's font problems, you should start here:

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

The_BadgerAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you. That's very helpful.

I'll look into it on the next ocassion I get an issue.. won't be long...

try67

Community Expert

I don't see how buying a Mac will solve this issue. The files are probably generated incorrectly by this application.

There's really not much that can be done about it, short of re-creating them from scratch. You can do that by exporting all the pages to (high quality) image files, preferably in a lossless format, such as PNG, and then create a new PDF file from those images in Acrobat.

And yes, PDF files are supposed to be portable, but if they are not created correctly they won't be...

The_BadgerAuthor

Known Participant

The problem is that people aren't doing much more than save to PDF. But because their OS is using the quartz PDFcontext producer the files are corrupt.

Rasterising is a lot of time and effort for something that should just work.

One of the main reasons I'm a windows guy is for this type of thing where Apple have introduced there own way of doing a thing instead of following the common standards. And we then have to do a lot of work because them.

My clients generally aren't designers or technically knowledgeable. They aren't at fault. Apple and Adobe really should get on top of this as its becoming too frequent for me.

There are a few occasions where even trying to rasterise in photoshop doesn't work.

I am frustrated and would like a better solution as some documents can take a lot of time to turn into images. Then I have confirm the images are correct.

I was also interested to see if I was alone in experiencing this issue.

try67

Community Expert

Adobe doesn't have anything to do with this issue, really.

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