[OS X TeX] pdf loses information

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jan 11, 2010, at 7:00 AM, Alex Hamann wrote:

> I am aware that the following problem is poorly described and requires some debugging. I nevertheless decided to go ahead and ask the list - maybe someone can point out how to best approach this issue.
> 
> I recently had to do a lot of beamer presentations. I usually create them in TeXShop (instead of my generally preferred Aquamacs). I noticed that on my system (SL 10.6.2, TeX Live 2009, TeXShop 2.29) sometimes the pdf file becomes corrupted and loses information. This results in partly white slides, loss of several slides or the whole presentation in the pdf file (tex file is fine thought). The pattern appears to be the following: I work on the tex file, run XeLaTeX several times on the file and get correct pdf-output.  I then shut my whole system down and return the next day to continue my work. On opening the tex file with TeXShop the pdf is then (often) shown with the problems mentioned above.  One XeLaTeX run brings all the slides back but it is really the pdf that is corrupt since opening that file with skim (or any other viewer for that matter) shows the white slides.
> I can not yet see a pattern (e.g. if only a specific type of slides is affected, say, those containing lists) and can also not directly connect this behavior to the shutting down/restart process. 
> Is anybody else seeing this too? Otherwise I will start testing with other editors, command line, etc.
> 
> Alex

Howdy,

You say you opened the file with TeXshop's viewer and Skim and ``or any other viewer''. The problem is that TeXShop's viewer, Skim and Preview all use the same PDFKit framework so kight be expected to behave the same way. Have you opened the file with Adobe Reader? Is the problem still present?

Also, you say that you used xelatex so what Fonts were used in your document. There are known problems with several of the System Fonts. I also had a crashing problem with xetex after doing a simple update from 10.6.1-?10.6.2 that was cleared up (Sigh... magically!?) by downloading and installing the Combo Update for 10.6.2. 

This sounds like it could be a Font Cache Corruption. Have you tried to use Onyx (v 2.1.3 for SL at <http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english/apps.html>) or FontNuke (see <http://www.jamapi.com/pr/fn/>) and cleaning out the caches.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)