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Does anyone have a clue why on PDF previews some areas are turning black on iPhone, iPad or Mac+Safari? Everything works fine in Windows with any browser.

We are linking from our website straight to the PDF file.

But on Apple devices it looks like this:

what it looks like on MAC

instead it should look like:

what it should look like on any device

We are using ghostscript to split and merge the PDF, but i don't think that's the reason. Any hint in the right direction is very welcome.

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  • Perhaps a link to the file in question?
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented Apr 16, 2019 at 20:52

1 Answer 1

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I managed to find the PDF in question. If posting it here is wrong please do let me know or edit it out

https://alldrink.de/wp-content/themes/alldrink/assets/angebote/pdf/08_04_20_04_2019_AB.pdf

My guess is that whatever you are using to make the PDF is leaving out specific information that macOS/iOS needs. PDF is a native file on macOS/iOS (NextStep used Display Postscript and the first iterations of OSX used PDF as a native display rendering engine. Hopefully my info is not badly out of date.)

But the macOS/iOS PDF rendering engine may be based on a PDF standard that is incomplete or does not support everything that Ghostscript outputs. Not being really familiar with Ghostscript I don't know.

It works in Acrobat on a Mac but not in Preview and displays that issue on my iPhone. Both devices have the latest OS versions.

If it is possible in Ghostscript to target earlier versions of the PDF standard when you output your brochure, I would try that. Possibly with multiple earlier versions till you hit one that renders on Apple OS systems better.

The other possibility is that the fonts (or graphics) used in the the non-rendering boxes are not downloaded to the PDF by Ghostscript. Perhaps if you render the graphics in the source as high res bitmaps (if they are not already) rather than vector images/postscript fonts that could be it as well.

You might also try asking this question on a discussion board that deals specifically with pre-press output to PDF as I would bet they would take one look at this and know what the problem is.

Sorry to be so vague, this started as a comment but I realized it was too long, but may not be an actual answer. Hopefully it points you to an avenue that leads to an answer...

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    Thanks Steve, thats actually some very helpful input. I assumed it could be the ghostscript. I will try different options there. Maybe i can convert the original PDF to a picture with ghostscript and then transfer it back to PDF so it will simply be a picture as PDF.
    – Marcel Gantert
    Commented Apr 17, 2019 at 21:48

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