Thanks to our coverage of the problems PDFKit has faced in Sierra and High Sierra (see the article series 'PDFKit Problems'), I occasionally hear from readers who are having troubles of one sort or another with PDFs. Most of the time, the problems are limited to a single corrupt PDF that might be viewable or printable with Acrobat Reader instead of Preview, but sometimes the concerns go deeper.
In most PDFs, you can simply click a text field, then type to enter text in the field. If you can't add text to a field, use a text box instead: Click the Text button in the markup toolbar, or choose Tools Annotate Text. To show font, size, and color options for text in a text box, click the Text Style button in the markup toolbar.
TidBITS reader Chris Lee wrote to ask if I'd heard of issues with a PDF's thumbnails rendering correctly, but each actual page showing as a single large black rectangle in the latest version of Preview under macOS 10.13.2 High Sierra. When he sent me the PDF, it opened and displayed fine in Preview on my Mac, running the same versions of macOS and Preview. Curious!
- Preview in Mac is a great PDF viewer and annotator, but it's not enough for editing. Normally, people got to convert the PDF file to something else and do the editing after. That isn't the most convenient option either. That is why a fully-fledged PDF editor for Mac is a necessity indeed!
- How to Edit a PDF on Mac. Apple provides every Mac with Preview, a free program that allows you to view and edit a PDF and other file types. With Preview, you can highlight text, include a signature, or add text and comments.
Nothing I suggested made any difference, but after some more research, Chris reported back with the solution, which he found in a thread in the Apple Support Communities. In that discussion, which also revolved around Preview and High Sierra, the problematic PDFs had been scanned in Image Capture and opened fine on other Macs.
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The solution may have been simple, but it was far from obvious. User oakcan reported suffering from the same problem and resolved it by calibrating his display. Chris said that recalibrating the display worked for him too.
To get started with that, open System Preferences > Displays > Color, and click the Calibrate button. That opens Apple's built-in Display Calibrator app, which provides an assistant-aided set of steps to calibrate your display — the specific steps may vary between displays.
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It's hard to imagine what set of dependencies could cause a display profile to blow out the rendering of PDF pages, but not thumbnails. But there you have it — if you're seeing black rectangles for PDF pages in Preview in High Sierra, try calibrating your display.
