Up until today, PDF documents embedded in notes previewed exactly as they appear when viewed in the Adobe PDF Reader. Today, the PDF previews are illegible with misc. characters.
This may be a bug but I decided to try posting to Help first to see if anyone else is experiencing this.
I’m running Obsidian v1.3.5 on Windows 10 Pro OS build 19045.3086
Things I have tried
I have searched Help and the forum as well as searching Google for Obsidian PDF preview display illegible characters and I have found nothing about what I am experiencing.
I have re-opened this Vault as well as restarted Obsidian.
I have checked for Updates to both Obsidian and Plugins and applied.
I pasted a snippet of what I am currently seeing in a sample document. This is what I am seeing for all PDF documents in all notes both when they are set to display with the ! in front of the embed as well as when I hold Ctrl and hover over the embedded link to the pdf files.
PDF.js (that link) is the “engine” Obsidian uses for viewing PDFs, so if it doesn’t work there, I don’t think there’s much the Obsidian team can do about it.
I’ve seen this before in PDFs with CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). It’s an encoding issue with whatever made the initial PDF. Text will be fine in the app that made the PDF, but it may not be viewable in other apps and produce results like this.
I wondered about that. Most of the PDFs I work with are English but have a Company Chop (stamp) that is Chinese or Korean.
Here is the Chop from the sample PDF
What caught me off guard was that the hundreds of PDFs that I’ve added over the past 6 months have viewed and previewed perfectly for over 6-months and then seemingly out of the blue this illegible viewing began today. I checked various “vintages” of PDF documents assuming that something in the encoding had changed with new documents added today but all PDF documents are impacted including those that have a last Created and Modified Date/Time of December 2022.
I make use of this specific Vault 7-days a week (60-80 hours per week) so I can pinpoint that this began today.
Do you have any ideas how I might research what could possibly have changed within the last 8-hours so that I can attempt to rollback some local dependency that PDF.js may have?
The new PDF viewer came with version 1.3.0 and I think that was released publicly with v1.3.4. Is it possible that Obsidian updated in the background and you haven’t restarted in a while? An update can download in the background but won’t be applied until a restart of Obsidian.
That’s the only thing I can think of, as nothing has changed or been released in the last few days. See the full Changelog for details: Obsidian Changelog - Obsidian
If it’s not sensitive, you could post a link to one of the PDFs here (or DM me the PDF or link) and we could take a look.
I have resolved this issue for the moment by not running Adobe Acrobat and Obsidian at the same time. Everyday I concurrently run both Obsidian and Adobe Acrobat and have not experienced the illegible characters issue.
For whatever reason, today running both Obsidian and Adobe Acrobat caused PDF rendering in Obsidian to manifest this issue.
To clarify further for anyone else who may stumble onto this thread, I closed out of Adobe Acrobat and I restarted Obsidian at which time the issue stopped.
I didn’t think that there were any underlying dependencies or ties between Obsidian, PDF.js, and Adobe Acrobat but after this occurrence I believe that there may be some either intentional or unintentional connections between some or all of the three.
Thanks @ariehen for your patience, tips, and troubleshooting help!
Now that is weird. And with Acrobat closed, is the PDF rendered fine in PDF.js viewer ? I wonder if Acrobat has hooks (an extension) into the main browser you use.
