Preview App And PostScript Conversion [was color laser printers]

[Charles Dyer]

On 05 May 2007, at 16:56:51, steve harley wrote:

> Preview (or rather the OS support in general) isn't really that  
> great at PDF either; i very often encounter PDFs that the OS cannot  
> display properly; not all of these are generated by Adobe apps;  
> this one has bedeviled me lately:
>
> <http://denvergov.org/Portals/193/documents/station%20area% 
> 20profiles/Alameda.pdf>
>
> even though it's PDF 1.3 (which supposedly Mac OS X fully  
> supports), much of the content is blank in Preview, but fine in  
> Reader or Acrobat Pro; i'd really rather use Preview for ready  
> reference because it is a much lighter weight tool

I haven't seen that. What I _have_ seen is Acrobat printing out only  
the first page of a file unless printing is set to print PDFs as  
images. This is the Official Fix™, from Adobe Tech Support. This  
'fix' has just one teeny weeny problem: printing as an image takes  
forever and a day.  Meanwhile, Preview will print the document in its  
entirety without problems. If I need a PDF printed, it's faster to  
dig up Preview, open the file in Preview, and print it than to print  
as an image from Acrobat. And the best part: the printers affected by  
this are all, without exception, fast laser printers. If I print the  
same file, from Acrobat, and not set to print as an image, to a slow,  
old, low-end inkjet (such as my HP PSC1350 all-in-one) it will print  
all the pages... it'll just print so slowly on the inkjet that I  
might as well print as an image on the laser.

I've got into the habit of using Preview except when I'm actually  
building a PDF. Preview will also open most (not all) .PS documents,  
as well, though it may take its time doing it.