But there you have it - if you’re seeing black rectangles for PDF pages in Preview in High Sierra, try calibrating your display. 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. 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. To get started with that, open System Preferences > Displays > Color, and click the Calibrate button. Chris said that recalibrating the display worked for him too. User oakcan reported suffering from the same problem and resolved it by calibrating his display. The solution may have been simple, but it was far from obvious. Create your own template by selecting different format settings, like color, layout, text style and much more. Make your business excel with an online console so multiple users can create invoices, reports and apply billing payments from their web browser. 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. Manage client accounts, quotes, orders, billing, invoicing applying payments and much more. 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. When he sent me the PDF, it opened and displayed fine in Preview on my Mac, running the same versions of macOS and Preview. 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.
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.
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.
#1597: Apple Watch fitness tracking, cloud storage issues, Roku Express 4K+, watchOS 8.4.1.#1598: OS updates, Fantastical 3.6 self-scheduling, Mindfulness measures HRV, Monterey on too-old Macs, TidBITS list gremlins.#1599: Avoiding blue light from screens, Bowflex C6 Bike spin cycle, Internet mapping services, Apple Buying Advice website.