PDF content disappears

[ncollingridge]

This is an issue which has been an annoyance for about a couple of years now, and I have put up with it in the obviously mistaken belief that Apple would fix it sooner or later. Well it is later and they still haven't fixed the issue. Essentially what happens is that I open a PDF with Preview and initially it displays OK, but after a short period of time some of the content of the PDF simply vanishes, and all I can see is a blank page. If you scroll to a different part of the document and then scroll back the content does not reappear. And then progressively all of the content of the PDF disappears. The only way to fix the problem is to close the document and re-open it.

Thinking that this might be a bug with Preview, I purchased UPDF which is a replacement for Preview. It is a reasonable product although not vastly better than Preview, and it does have some significant shortcomings, but this post is not really about UPDF. The key thing is that UPDF has exactly the same problem with the content of the PDF disappearing.

This suggests that the issue is with the PDF rendering engine in macOS. If this was a very widespread issue I would have thought it would have received more coverage than it has - I have not been able to find many references to it anywhere. Maybe people are just putting up with it like I was, but it really is a real nuisance.

My one speculation is that it may be an issue with an interaction between the PDF renderer and the graphics card driver. My computer is an iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019 (macOS 13.4), with a Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB graphics card. However I have not seen any other problems which could be attributed to the graphics card driver, so I am not convinced this is the explanation.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

 

[retta283]

That is incredibly bizarre. Have you tried to view the PDF using Quick Look in Finder? Since that third party app is having the same issue, you may get the same result, but worth a try. I'd also download Microsoft Word, as that will be almost guaranteed to use a different renderer for PDFs. You should be able to use Word in read-only mode for free to test this.

I fear that it may just be on your end, this is a grave issue that would've appeared online by now if it were widespread. Whether it's the GPU or not I can't say, but anything can be affected by GPU driver or hardware issues, even the folder icons can appear differently with poor drivers.

Edit: Ah, you are not alone it seems. Check this thread out: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-is-text-disappearing-in-pdfs.2380428/