BE's PDF viewer

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enrico.scarpella
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2018 7:32 pm

BE's PDF viewer

Post by enrico.scarpella »

Hi all,

I was wondering whether one can select which PDF viewer is used to view PDFs in the preview pane of BE. Below is the context for my question. Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,
Enrico

***

Context

I have four Macs (two iMacs, one MBA, one MBP — different ages). One is running MacOS 12.5; I've updated the other three to MacOS 12.6. After the update, the Preview app no longer shows images in some PDFs. The images are still visible if I open the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The PDFs in question are articles downloaded from journal websites. The images are not visible when I view those PDFs on the journal websites in Safari, but I can see those images when I use Firefox and select Adobe Acrobat Reader as Firefox's PDF viewer.

Images in those PDFs are also not visible in the the preview pane of BE and when I open those PDFs in BE using Preview. To work around that, I have now selected Adobe Acrobat Reader as the default app to open PDFs in BE. But this workaround forces me to open those PDFs every time I want to look at their images instead of leveraging BE's preview pane for that.

The images in those PDFs are also not visible in BE for iOS.

I've contacted Apple Support about it, but they were unable to diagnose and fix the issue. They told me that Apple may simply have stopped supporting certain features in older PDFs. This may or may not be reverted in future updates. For me, this is an additional problem because one of my Macs — and some of the Macs in my lab — are too old to be updated to MacOS Ventura, so I'm trying to understand what my options are.

Thank you for your consideration.
Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10048
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
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Re: BE's PDF viewer

Post by Jon »

Bookends doesn't use any PDF viewer to display PDFs. It uses PDFKit (part of macOS). I haven't encountered a proper PDF before where images were visible in Acrobat Reader but not Preview. Please send me such a PDF, I'm curious. support@sonnysoftware.com

Jon
Sonny Software
enrico.scarpella
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2018 7:32 pm

Re: BE's PDF viewer

Post by enrico.scarpella »

Thank you very much, Jon. I’m going to send you a couple of those PDFs at the address in your reply.

Best regards,
Enrico
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