[OS X TeX] Mysterious behavior of Preview.app

[Axel E. Retif]

On May 14, 2008, at 21:09, Jin-Hwan Cho wrote:

> The following PDF file shows some mysterious behavior of Preview.app.
>
> http://project.ktug.or.kr/dvipdfmx/sample/misc/pplr8r.pdf
>
> Check the characters in the first line. If it was opened with  
> Preview.app,
> you may see some european characters with accents. But with
> Adobe Reader, you may see completely different result and that is the
> the right one.

And not only the first line is wrong, but many others, especially in  
the lower half. The problem not only appears in Preview, but with all  
the programs that use Apple's PDF renderer: TeXShop, Skim, PDFView.

It renders the same in Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat Professional 6 (Mac  
OS 10.4.11), and, under Ubuntu 7.10, Evince Document Viewer 2 and  
Xpdf 3.

Now the curious thing ---I did my own tables for pplr8r with ``tex  
testfont'', ``pdftex testfont'' and ``xetex testfont'', each one  
rendered correctly: the same viewed with TeXShop and Skim or Adobe  
Reader. In the case of ``tex testfonf'' the dvi was converted by  
TeXShop and Skim to PDF, but also TeXniscope showed the dvi correctly.

Next I tried XeTeX (0.997) with ``xelatex nfssfont.tex'' and font  
``pplr8r.tfm'', and the output renders again correctly: the same  
viewed either with TeXShop or Adobe Reader.

To summarize: your PDF indeed shows different output with  
applications that use Apple's PDF renderer, on the one hand, or Adobe  
Reader, on the other; but my own tests show the same output in all  
applications.

Best,

Axel