I’m wondering what’s going with PDFs I have scanned and imported into Scrivener. They’re not rendering very clearly at all; it looks like they’ve been scanned at a really poor resolution. However, if I view them in Preview, they’re fine. To make matters more complicated, for the latest scan, it sometimes seems to correct itself.
I’ll try to include an image that demonstrate what I am talking about:
This is one PDF file in the mane pane in Scrivener. The top part looks like what I want it to look like, and this is what the whole file looks like in Preview. Some other PDFs I have scanned look like the bottom, ugly version, all the way through.
What are you using to scan and save as PDF? I’ve used a couple of scan/OCR packages (Acrobat Pro, ABBYY) and have noticed that they can introduce extremely cumbersome amounts of unnecessary data to the resultant PDFs, making them occasionally render badly or slowly. Opening and re-saving in Preview (via “save as”) seems to solve most of the problems for me, but not all the time. It’s very annoying.
I’ve fixed this for 2.0. It only affects some PDF files, and it seems that the PDF view out-of-the-box has this problem. Apple have customised the standard PDF view in Preview to avoid this, but fortunately so have Skim, which is open source, so I found the fix there.