Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X?
I've been turning text and other documents (e.g. web pages) into PDFs on my iBook for portability reasons (I'm a Mac user working in a cold Windoze world) and have noticed that the 'Save as PDF' feature in OS X can't handle more than about 50 pages of text. In the case of, say, a 186 page plain text document what you see when you open up the resulting PDF version is a perfect PDF copy of the original up to page 51 -- with the last two lines or so of text garbled -- and then just blank pages for the last 135 pages or so. Has anyone else seen this? Is this a bug, or could it be a deliberate limitation on Apple's part so as not to cut into Adobe's commercial product sales? Any solutions? I'm running 10.3.2, 640Mb RAM. R.K.
RE: Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X?
Good point. Just created two brand new PDFs from two separate 186 page and 81 page plain text documents. Opened them both up with Preview ... no problems ... I can see all the pages perfectly. Opened them up with Adobe Reader 6.0 ... it can only see first 51 pages of each and in both cases the last two lines on page 51 are garbled. Curious. Adobe Reader 6.0 opens up all other PDF documents (i.e. created by others) that are well in excess of these sizes. I've just tried it. It just can not recognise more than 51 pages in a PDF document created via the print menu in OS X ... at least on my particular setup. Any ideas? I did a clean install of everything a week or so ago. Only thing I can think of is maybe my Adobe Reader 6.0 is corrupted ... but then why will it open up other PDFs on this machine ... and why always a 51 page limitation with the last two lines of text garbled on page 51? R.K. -Original Message- From: James Devenish [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 6 January 2004 10:18 AM To: Kay, Richard Subject: Re: Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X? Hi, In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:55:08AM +0800, Kay, Richard wrote: In the case of, say, a 186 page plain text document what you see when you open up the resulting PDF version is a perfect PDF copy of the original up to page 51 -- with the last two lines or so of text garbled -- and then just blank pages for the last 135 pages or so. Has anyone else seen this? I've not observed this problem. Out of curiosity: have you tried any other documents? Have you compared viewing the PDF in Preview and Adobe Acrobat Reader?
RE: Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X?
Many thanks to Yvonne and James Devenish for playing around with my 'corrupted' files earlier this morning and for experimenting and creating their own files to test the problem. Looks like the 51 page limitation (or bug) I reported earlier arises ONLY when creating PDF files using TextEdit and reading the PDF file using either Adobe Reader 5.0 or 6.0. The 51 page limitation (or bug) does not appear to arise when creating PDF files using, for example, AppleWorks or M$Word (Office X) and reading the PDF file using either Adobe Reader 5.0 or 6.0. This appears to be another one of those curious little twists in this 10 dimensional universe of ours. I hope I've made sound inferences there ... I have consumed so much coffee this morning in preparation for tonight's webcast that I'm not sure I am thinking straight ... but I'm looking forward to an orgy of new low-cost iPods in the wee hours tomorrow morning ... maybe the release of iWrite ... wondering what GarageBand actually does ... and wonder whether I'll be able to afford to upgrade my Toyota Echo to a Hilux Ute and start saving again before Apple releases its liquid-cooled G4 iBooks ... a ... speculation ... speculation. R.K. -Original Message- From: Kay, Richard Sent: Tuesday, 6 January 2004 9:55 AM To: WAMUG Mailing List Subject: Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X? I've been turning text and other documents (e.g. web pages) into PDFs on my iBook for portability reasons (I'm a Mac user working in a cold Windoze world) and have noticed that the 'Save as PDF' feature in OS X can't handle more than about 50 pages of text. SNIP Is this a bug, or could it be a deliberate limitation on Apple's part so as not to cut into Adobe's commercial product sales? SNIP
Re: Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X? - Acrobat Reader
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 12:57:59PM +0800, Kay, Richard wrote: Many thanks to Yvonne and James Devenish for playing around with my 'corrupted' files earlier this morning and for experimenting and creating their own files to test the problem. Looks like the 51 page limitation (or bug) I reported earlier arises ONLY when creating PDF files using TextEdit and reading the PDF file using either Adobe Reader 5.0 or 6.0. We tried various other applications and found that it was only TextEdit that led to trouble, and the trouble was only seen with Adobe's Reader. I tried versions from 3 through 6 under a variety of operating systems and CPU architectures. All failed to display the document correctly yet emitted no diagnostic messages. On a technical level, it seems that Acrobat Reader (and no other software) silently fails to decode the 'deflated' stream contents of some pages. If I replace the inner binary stream of one page with that of another, the page displays fine (implying that the graphics environment is okay). The 51 page limitation (or bug) does not appear to arise when creating PDF files using, for example, AppleWorks or M$Word (Office X) and reading the PDF file using either Adobe Reader 5.0 or 6.0. I also found that is possible to 'refactor' TextEdit's PDFs losslessly (convert from PDF to PDF) so that Acrobat Reader can display them. (Note, though, that extracting individual pages out of the original PDF does not improve the situation.) Although I suspect a long-standing bug in Acrobat Reader's decompression code, or perhaps an intolerance to a compression error from which all other decoders can recover, I have no idea how that would be related to a 51-page phenomenon.
Re: Limitations on Converting to PDF in OS X?
Curiosity got the better of me as well. Created a 166 page pdf document from a BBEdit text document. The newly created pdf document opened and displayed all pages just fine in Acrobat Reader 6 and Preview 2.1 Using OS X 10.3.2 David Watkins http://members.iinet.net.au/~davwat/
