I’ve been noticing since upgrading to Leopard last week that PDF’s that are made using LaTeX do not always look right in Preview. Here’s the same PDF made using LaTeX (TeXShop, to be exact), opened three times in immediate succession using Preview (click to enlarge each):
The third one (rightmost) finally looks like it’s supposed to, but the other two have this strange-looking font substitution for text, and the math is just completely out of whack.
Again, this is the same PDF opened up, then closed, then opened again right after that, then again. No additional LaTeX builds were done. Also, the PDF viewer that comes with TeXShop had the same problems with fonts.
Anybody have a thought as to what’s going on here?
Casting Out Nines 
It looks like your font cache may be corrupted. This is not uncommon on Macs. You can get some quick info with a google search for (corrupt “font cache” mac). Hope this helps!
That’s just the “Early Adopter Detection Algorithm” kicking in. It is designed to detect tech addicts who upgrade before the first service pack and fail to check with the authors of their key software (Maple, in this case) to make sure the new OS is supported. The EADA will generate apparently random system behavior for the first few weeks just to make you slap yourself on the forehead for being too eager. You’ll swear that you will be more cautious next time, but you’ll forget that promise and when Bobcat (or will it be Calico? or Puma? or Lolcat? http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/25/poll-cheetah-puma-jaguar-panther-tiger-leopard-and/) is release in early 2010 you’ll be standing in line at the Indy Mac store at 5:59pm…
And yes, my copy of Leopard is on its way…. 🙂
I guess I should stick to early adoption only when it comes to my kids!
Wasn’t “Puma” the codename for 10.1?
If I wasn’t in the middle of needing a lot of my current software for my dissertation, I would upgrade to Leopard in a heartbeat.
in fact, puma was 10.1. my mistake.
Any luck solving this issue? I just noticed the same problem.
Oddly enough this issue hasn’t actually persisted. I didn’t try doing anything to fix my font caches or anything — the font issue just hasn’t returned. I can’t remember offhand if I was having this problem before the 10.5.1 OS update.
I am having exactly the same problems with Leopard + TexShop + Preview. It seems as if the TexShop viewer is corrupting something in Leopard, so that all documents subsequently viewed in Preview are incorrectly formatted. Restarting Leopard clears the problem… until I next use TexShop. Very annoying!
NB I have updated to 10.5.1 and the problem still occurs.
@Dave: You may be on to something here, because I recently started using Aquamacs for my LaTeX editing and it was around that time that I stopped noticing the font issues. So maybe this is problem with TeXShop and its Leopard compatibility.
Hey, I have had a similar problem… i think TexShop kept working with leopard, but when I installed Adobe CS3 and used Illustrator, then all of a sudden Preview couldn’t show the fonts properly (even for downloaded pdfs!) TexShop actually was compiling them properly though, as even though preview couldnt show them, Acrobat still could! I also found that latex equation editor and keynote also could NOT display fonts properly:(
I have the exact same issue right now. I’m not using a specific editor (just vim), and the compile chain I’m using is latex->latex->dvipdf. Same thing happens with latex->latex->dvips->ps2pdf. I’m convinced it’s a rendering bug (since opening the same file three times changes the rendering… and in fact keeping the same file open I can see it switch sometimes).
I’m going to research the font cache stuff now.
This tip fixed it completely:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071026081555971