[Fixed!] Problem with OpenRocket PDFs on Mac

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To recap:

1) the OR generated PDF renders fine visually on the screen using Adobe on Mac.
2) the OR generated PDF when emailed and printed from a Windows machine (presumably via Adobe as well?) prints fine on the same printer.

Once the PDF is generated, OR is out of the processing pipeline as it defers to the PDF viewer to handle the printing. Since you've established that the PDF is valid, the problem is most likely somewhere in your printing subsystem or print driver. Have you tried installing updated print drivers specific to your printer (don't rely on generic print drivers)?

Doug
 
To recap:

1) the OR generated PDF renders fine visually on the screen using Adobe on Mac.
2) the OR generated PDF when emailed and printed from a Windows machine (presumably via Adobe as well?) prints fine on the same printer.

Correct. Also, the OR PDF does not render properly either on the screen or on the printed version when using Preview.

Once the PDF is generated, OR is out of the processing pipeline as it defers to the PDF viewer to handle the printing. Since you've established that the PDF is valid, the problem is most likely somewhere in your printing subsystem or print driver. Have you tried installing updated print drivers specific to your printer (don't rely on generic print drivers)?

Doug

I don't think so. I'd have to double check with my Dad though, as he's the one who set up the printer.
 
Since you've established that the PDF is valid
Is that necessarily true? I don't know much about PDF but it seems to me it could be either that Preview and the printer, but not Adobe, are rendering a valid PDF incorrectly, or Adobe, but not Preview or the printer, is rendering an invalid PDF correctly.

It seems unlikely that the problem is the print driver since the same problem is occurring in Preview.
 
As mentioned before I've also had this issue when viewing an OR PDF on my both of my iPod touches (4th and 5th gen). The only other iOS device I've been able to test is my Grandmothers iPad (1st gen) and it too also had the same issue. Kruland or Duckhead, if you own an iOS device try viewing an OR PDF on it to see what happens.
 
Sorry, I don't have any IOS devices. The file seems to be valid because it renders correctly using Adobe's tools and can be viewed and printed correctly on other systems.

My suspicion is that the preview application in OSx has some serious deficiencies. This application is likely used by the printing subsystem to render the pdf into bitmap prior to sending to the printer. You said that viewing it in Adobe reader on the mac worked, can you print directly from reader?

Kevin

As mentioned before I've also had this issue when viewing an OR PDF on my both of my iPod touches (4th and 5th gen). The only other iOS device I've been able to test is my Grandmothers iPad (1st gen) and it too also had the same issue. Kruland or Duckhead, if you own an iOS device try viewing an OR PDF on it to see what happens.
 
I wrote the printing (and PDF) subsystem for OR and developed it on a MacBook Pro. I've only ever used Preview and have not seen this issue before. Back in June when this thread started the troublesome PDF was attached here and I was able to render and print the PDF on my Mac using Preview just fine. The only difference is that I'm on OSX Lion, not Mountain Lion. I'll keep digging, but it's pretty strange, and since I can't reproduce it, I don't have much to go on.

Doug
 
I've just discovered having the same problem on the Mac I'm using now. Both rocketgeek101's rocket and one of my own. PDF displays correctly in Adobe but not in Preview or in Skim (another PDF viewer application). I've never noticed this before, probably because (as far as I can recall) I've only ever done PDF exports from OR on my other Mac. That Mac uses the same version of OR, but an earlier version of the OS (10.7, I think? vs. 10.8) and an earlier version of Java (1.6 vs. 1.7).

In fact I just checked, and the PDFs exported on the other Mac and which look fine on the other Mac are bad (in Skim and Preview) on this Mac!

And as someone reported above, if (in Skim) I zoom out far enough, the missing parts reappear. Zoom back in and they disappear again.

Very odd.
 
This seems to suggest then that the PDF only renders incorrectly in the latest version of OS X. Which would explain why I'm having this issue and kruland and duckhead aren't.
 
Doug,

I'm going to try a few things like newer iText or wider lines just to see if it clears up this issue. I did run the pdf through an online validator and it showed some problems (/DeviceGray not being defined, and /ca not being the right value) - but I don't really know what this means.... probably have to crack open iText and the pdf spec to figure it all out.

Kevin
 
I just got my hands on a Mac with Mountain Lion and I was able to reproduce the issue in Preview - no body tube rendered. In Safari the PDF was just a black screen. After removing the AdobePDF plugins, the PDF in Safari was no longer black but it wouldn't render the body tube just like Preview. That machine had both Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Pro and it renders fine with them.

I'm out of ideas, sorry. 10.9 (Mavericks) is due out in a few weeks. Maybe that will fix it. Or as Kevin suggested, I can try generating the body tube image with a wider line. The print points to display pixels conversion on a Retina display may be resulting in it rounding down to 0 pixels. Or possibly it's an anti-aliasing issue.

Doug
 
Doug,

I tried bumping the thin line width to 2.0f, and it didn't help. Neither did the newest iText.

Kevin
 
I tried looking at an OR pdf file in Adobe Acrobat Pro. No problems reported. Tried some conversions in the Preflight... menu. Nothing resulted in a file Preview or Skim would render correctly.

Some Googling turns up some complaints dating back to September of 2011 about PDF files that Adobe would render correctly but Preview would not in OS X Lion:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1234170
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14925571
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/52294/pdf-rendering-bug-in-os-x-and-ios

(The first of these features multiple self-proclaimed experts contradicting one another and declaring each others' responses "nonsense". No actual resolution of the problem.)

As far as I can tell these had to do with fonts being improperly embedded by an old version of Microsoft Word. Improper or not, Adobe was able to render them correctly but Preview couldn't. But I haven't found anything about graphics not rendering correctly, yet, other than this OR issue.

So there may be precedent of sorts for this problem, but the exact symptoms seem to be OR specific. That is, if it's a bug in Apple's PDF renderer, it looks like one that few if any applications other than OR cause to manifest.
 
Figured I'd let everyone know: Just finished installing Mavericks, and the first thing I did was check an OR pdf in preview. It's fixed!! Yeah! Way to go Apple! As an aside, the pdf's also now work properly on iOS devices running iOS 7.
 
Good to know! I usually let a new OS version age for a few months before installing it, and so far I do not plan to make an exception for Mavericks (as a matter of fact, I only just upgraded this Mac to Mountain Lion a couple weeks ago...)* but this becomes one entry in the "reasons to upgrade" column.

* for OR related reasons, come to think of it
 
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