Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Adobe Reader - Preview Anomaly

I usually don't have Adobe Reader installed as I get most everything I need from Preview. However, yesterday I bumped into a situation that required Reader.

I received an official receipt and, although it was a PDF, it may have been in layers. That is, the the common layout in one layer and the changeable data (date, amount) in another. Preview would open the PDF but only 'saw' the common layout. It did not display the date or amount.

The receipt came with the disclaimer about "Requires Adobe Reader - download here" but, then, so do lots of sites where Preview works fine.

Is there a way to get Preview to 'see' both layers?

Not as far as I know.

Preview is actually limited in the types of PDF files it can view. There are several different versions of the PDF specification. Preview supports everything in the PDF 1.2 specification and most (but not all) of what's in the PDF 1.3 specification, but none of the features specified in PDF 1.4.

This includes, among other things, encrypted PDFs, embedded data contained inside a PDF file stream object (this might have been what your receipt data was), custom document outlines, certain types of form elements (Preview can deal with some PDF forms, but not others), and certain types of embedded fonts (which is why Preview can display most PDF fonts correctly but occasionally has trouble rendering some fonts in some PDF 1.4 documents like it should).

For more details on other PDF versions of to 1.7 view the Wiki.