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J
John15B9
Participant
December 7, 2020
Question

Missing content on PDFs

  • December 7, 2020
  • 6 replies
  • 5696 views

I'm an editorial designer who creates page layouts in InDesign and proofs to PDF. Since a recent auto-update of Acrobat some PDFs don't display correctly with areas of missing or distorted content. This is usually type but sometimes colour backgrounds and images disappear too. The good news is that the PDFs are fine when veiwed by my clients. The bad news is that when they send back the proofs with marked up comments I can't see the copy they've corrected. I’m working on a Mac (OS High Sierra 10.13.6) and the PDFs are created from InDesign (2020 15.1.3.302). Any suggestions welcome. Thanks

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6 replies

R
Adobe Employee
RachitJain
Adobe Employee
December 18, 2020

Hi John,

Thank you for sharing the concern here. I would like to see the pdf for checking it on our side. Please share a weblink/cloud link so that we can help you in resolving the issue. Also please share the current version of Acrobat with us. You can check it by Acrobat Pro DC-> About Adobe Acrobat Pro DC -> Version number would be under title "Adobe Acrobat Pro DC".

 

Along with this, I would suggest you to update to the latest version of Acrobat and confirm if the issue is resolved.

 

Thanks

Rachit

L
Adobe Employee
Leonard_Rosenthol
Adobe Employee
December 8, 2020

Can someone please post a PDF that demonstrates the problem?  Without an actual PDF we can't attempt to reproduce or diagnose...

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
December 18, 2020

@Leonard_Rosenthol, the ones we've seen at my shop are proprietary information that we can't share.

I'm keeping a lookout for one that we can send you.

 

But I can tell that this started happening after the last Acrobat update (early Dec) on both Mac and Windows workstations. And it's inconsistent: PDF views fine on some workstations, has missing content on others.

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
Dave__M
Community Expert
Dave__MCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 7, 2020

My initial thought is to know in what program is the customer's markup being done.  I've heard many stories about PDFs being opened in Mac preview, and that leaving the doc in bad shape ultimately.  Are they using Adobe Reader/Acrobat?  A different program?  Have you tried viewing the file on another computer?  Can it be isolated to just your machine?

My best,

Dave

J
John15B9Author
Participant
December 7, 2020

Hi Dave. Good suggestion. I've just copied a PDF to another Mac and it displays just fine. It's running an older Acrobat DC version 19.010.20099 so the logical conclusion is that it's the new version of the app on my main computer. It was working just fine until Adobe auto-updated it a couple of weeks ago. Thought I'd turned off all Creative Cloud auto-updates but it seems Acrobat works independantly. Definately not a Mac Preview problem by the way. My client in this case are a professional publishing agency who open and mark up PDF proofs properly. John

A
Anonymous
December 7, 2020

Sounds like we have a major bug with the latest Acrobat version...missing content in many ways.

I'll post this in Prerelease.

 

A
Anonymous
December 7, 2020

We're finding something similar with PDFs in the newest update of Acrobat:

The content is visible, but no longer accessible by screen readers. Ours is an accessibility issue.

The PDF was fine, and readable by screen readers.

But after changing a tag from <P> to <H2> for example, it's no longer readable by scren reders.

Whole portions of text become unreadable: paragraphs, headings, whatever.

Makes me wonder what Adobe did to the latest upgrade.

 

Luke Jennings3
Community Expert
Luke Jennings3Community Expert
Community Expert
December 7, 2020

I'm going to assume the PDFs look fine when you send them to your clients, but when they are returned, they don't display correctly. If this is the case, your clients might be causing harm to your PDF proofs somehow. Are they using Acrobat or Reader to view and make comments to the PDF? Are they processing the PDF through a workflow? If you don't believe your clients are causing the problems, you could try resetting your Acrobat preferences:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/how-to-reset-acrobat-preference-settings-to-default/td-p/4792082?page=1

 

J
John15B9Author
Participant
December 7, 2020

Hi Luke. No, they look wrong when I send them but they're fine when they arrive. I don't think there ia anything wrong with PDF file – it's just not displaying correctly on my computer. Thumbnails viewed in the finder folders also look fine. Your suggestion of resetting the preferences is good one so I'll give that a try. Thanks.

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
December 7, 2020

Since you believe the problem is related to an update to Acrobat, please share the version of Acrobat. Also please share one PDF which shows this problem (a sample without personal info, since the world will see it). You will need to give an exact description (or screen shot) of what is missing.

    J
    John15B9Author
    Participant
    December 7, 2020

    Hi. My version of Acrobat is 20.013.20064. The attached two screenshots show how it should look and the how the PDF looks with areas missing/not displaying. The PDF file thumbnail looks fine BTW. Thanks

    J
    John15B9Author
    Participant
    December 7, 2020

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