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Some PDF documents appear black or in inverted colours

Ravi_MR

Ravi_MR

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 27, 2016
134
126
Hi,

This week (probably after Mac OS 15.2 update) I have noticed that some colour PDFs appear weird - in black or inverted colours though I have not changed anything in accessibility settings.

Problem is in :M1 iMac 24 inch and Macbook Air 13 inch
OS: Both have been updated to 15.2
Affected files: Some PDF documents which are colour scans of old books - downloaded from Archive.org or Hathitrust. Not all such PDF documents are affected.
Apps: Mac native preview app and PDF expert app (which is what I use usually). The problem is not there in Foxit PDF editor - the same documents appear as normal.

Screenshots attached of (a) Preview app (b) PDF Expert app and (c) Foxit PDF editor...

Has anyone else faced this?
Wondering if this is a bug after OS update or any setting I need to change?
 

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The macOS update has screwed up Preview's ability to properly render PDFs created with the tools that the Internet Archive is using…maybe because of some sort of compression method their tools use. This also affects any apps that use the macOS PDFkit framework.

I was able to create a workable PDF version of the file by viewing it with Firefox and printing to a PDF. However, that file ended up being 31.1MB instead of the original 2MB. Uploading the Firefox-printed PDF to smallpdf.com got the file down to 3.8MB.

File a bug report with Apple.
 
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BrianBaughn said:
The macOS update has screwed up Preview's ability to properly render PDFs created with the tools that the Internet Archive is using…maybe because of some sort of compression method their tools use. This also affects any apps that use the macOS PDFkit framework.

I was able to create a workable PDF version of the file by viewing it with Firefox and printing to a PDF. However, that file ended up being 31.1MB instead of the original 2MB. Uploading the Firefox-printed PDF to smallpdf.com got the file down to 3.8MB.

File a bug report with Apple.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the investigation and feedback. Will find out how to report a bug later tonight, and then do it. If you know, please share.
 
Ravi_MR said:
Hi,

This week (probably after Mac OS 15.2 update) I have noticed that some colour PDFs appear weird - in black or inverted colours though I have not changed anything in accessibility settings.

Problem is in :M1 iMac 24 inch and Macbook Air 13 inch
OS: Both have been updated to 15.2
Affected files: Some PDF documents which are colour scans of old books - downloaded from Archive.org or Hathitrust. Not all such PDF documents are affected.
Apps: Mac native preview app and PDF expert app (which is what I use usually). The problem is not there in Foxit PDF editor - the same documents appear as normal.

Screenshots attached of (a) Preview app (b) PDF Expert app and (c) Foxit PDF editor...

Has anyone else faced this?
Wondering if this is a bug after OS update or any setting I need to change?
Click to expand...
I'm having the same problem too, but only with some PDFs. I cannot say why. When I open the PDFs with PDFelement or PDF Expert, the colors are inverted, the same happens in the preview of Finder or Path Finder, but if I open the pdf in Acrobat Reader the content is perfect. Any suggestion? Thanks.
 

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Iñaki777 said:
Any suggestion?
Click to expand...
As has already been said, macOS has problems with rendering PDFs from the Internet Archive. Apps which don't use macOS's underlying PDF rendering may work as expected. PDF is a very broad standard with many little details which may not always be implemented by particular rendering software. I would certainly expect Adobe Reader to get it right as Adobe is the de facto driver of the standards.

Get Info of your sample shows its encoding software as "Internet Archive PDF 1.4.24; including mupdf and pymupdf/skimage". I assume that would explain the problem to someone well versed in PDF standards - my understanding (web search!) is that mupdf relates to images in PDFs..
 
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They have made some changes to PDFKit recently, so almost certainly a bug. If it's like the bugs they introduced in PDFKit in Sierra, it'll take two OS iterations before they all get fixed.
 
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gilby101 said:
As has already been said, macOS has problems with rendering PDFs from the Internet Archive. Apps which don't use macOS's underlying PDF rendering may work as expected. PDF is a very broad standard with many little details which may not always be implemented by particular rendering software. I would certainly expect Adobe Reader to get it right as Adobe is the de facto driver of the standards.

Get Info of your sample shows its encoding software as "Internet Archive PDF 1.4.24; including mupdf and pymupdf/skimage". I assume that would explain the problem to someone well versed in PDF standards - my understanding (web search!) is that mupdf relates to images in PDFs..
Click to expand...
Thank you very much, gilby101. Do you know if there is a way of change the standard of that kind of PDFs into a standard which comply with macOs?
How do you got the info of the PDF encoding? Thank you again.
 
gilby101 said:
As has already been said, macOS has problems with rendering PDFs from the Internet Archive. Apps which don't use macOS's underlying PDF rendering may work as expected. PDF is a very broad standard with many little details which may not always be implemented by particular rendering software. I would certainly expect Adobe Reader to get it right as Adobe is the de facto driver of the standards.

Get Info of your sample shows its encoding software as "Internet Archive PDF 1.4.24; including mupdf and pymupdf/skimage". I assume that would explain the problem to someone well versed in PDF standards - my understanding (web search!) is that mupdf relates to images in PDFs..
Click to expand...
I don't know if there is quick and easy solution to change the image standard, but I just realize that I can export the document to Word with PDFelement and convert again to PDF and know I have a PDF with the correct colors and appearance.
 
gilby101 said:
As has already been said, macOS has problems with rendering PDFs from the Internet Archive. Apps which don't use macOS's underlying PDF rendering may work as expected. PDF is a very broad standard with many little details which may not always be implemented by particular rendering software. I would certainly expect Adobe Reader to get it right as Adobe is the de facto driver of the standards.

Get Info of your sample shows its encoding software as "Internet Archive PDF 1.4.24; including mupdf and pymupdf/skimage". I assume that would explain the problem to someone well versed in PDF standards - my understanding (web search!) is that mupdf relates to images in PDFs..
Click to expand...
Just another tip, in case it is useful for somebody: I have changed in PDF element Menu / Preferences / General / "Modo de visualización de Documentos" (I don't know the name in the English version, maybe: "Document Display Mode" or similar) from "Modo de alto rendimiento" (High Performance Mode?) to "Modo de compatibilidad" (Compatibility Mode?) and now I see the PDFs with the standard normal colors, instead of inverted colors.
Just in case is useful.
 
I have been getting weird PDF bugs as well. If I try to combine two PDFs, it crashes preview unless I put it in a very specific order.
 
Iñaki777 said:
I don't know if there is quick and easy solution to change the image standard, but I just realize that I can export the document to Word with PDFelement and convert again to PDF and know I have a PDF with the correct colors and appearance.
Click to expand...
Glad you found a solution. Post #6 above from @BrianBaughn uses Firefox to read the PDF and then its print to PDF. Makes a much bigger PDF.
 
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gilby101 said:
Glad you found a solution. Post #6 above from @BrianBaughn uses Firefox to read the PDF and then its print to PDF. Makes a much bigger PDF.
Click to expand...
It's only a temporary solution, because every time I need to download the file, convert to Word or Pages, then convert again to PDF and finally make an OCR, because the PDF lost it's properties in the process.
It would be wonderful to know what happened in my Mac, because I never have experienced this problem before. It only started like a month before. Do you think it is a problem with the browser? I have tried Brave (Chrome based) and it have the same problem.
 
IvyKing said:
The pdf that @Ravi_MR posted in #5 renders correctly on my iPad running iPadOS 18.2.
Click to expand...
Thank you very much. At the beginning I didn't realize that I need to "Print" the file in PDF, instead of save it as a PDF. But the file is really big and it lost the OCR.
 
Last edited:
Those who are having the problems with the pdf changing colors...

... would you happen to be running "in dark mode" ???
 
Iñaki777 said:
Anybody knows how to inform Apple of this problem with the macOS PDFkit framework?
Click to expand...
You can do that here:

www.apple.com

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Oddly, the Preview App isn't listed. You could go through the Books app link. Let them know about things on the feedback page like the Books version list not being up to date.
 
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