Some photos in pdf document squished vertically

[DaveWT]

Today's mystery... A Windows PC using friend forwards to me a newsletter he receives from his car club. When I open the newsletter (in Preview) most of the photos therein are perfect but some are squished vertically so are almost unrecognizable. I am curious how some photos on a page can be fine while others on the same page are squished. My friend claims when he looks at the same newsletter as received on his PC, everything is ticky boo (that's technical jargon), so something seems to be happening either on the forwarding from PC to Mac or else there is something in the basic document formatting that isn't working properly on a Mac. Any ideas?

 

[DaveS]

Perhaps you could forward me the newsletter and I'll see if I see the same as you.
Dave
dsquance at me.com

 

[DaveWT]

Thanks Dave, I will have to check with the friend to make sure I have permission to forward it on. Of course the copy I have has already been forwarded from the editor to my friend and then forwarded again to me. It would be nice to have the original I suppose.

 

[Diane Runnals]

I am no expert, but, have you tried to reduce the quote level on the document?

 

[DaveWT]

I am not exactly sure what you mean. It is a pdf so I have limited chance to edit it.

 

[DaveWT]

I received a different newsletter today - this one direct from the publisher rather than second hand from a PC using friend. This one had the exact same issue with some images (but not all) on a page being squished vertically. So I contacted the publisher to get his thoughts and he was able to fix the problem immediately and gave this explanation:

"Yes, apparently recently updated Apple devices don't like gray scale images compressed with LZW compression. PCs work fine, and older Apple devices work fine, as do Android devices.

We can fix it by forcing the B&W images to use SRGB with standard jpeg compression. But ultimately, it's an Apple bug, our fix is a workaround to replace an image format that is displaying fine on everything else with a format that's not so buggy on new Apple devices."

I have sent this to Apple as feedback since I didn't have this problem until the most recent update to macOS

 

[Bruce Whittington]

I experienced something similar a while back but not with pdf files - they were jpegs, and it seemed to be a cross-platform email incompatibility problem. The thread is here if it is of use to you:

Stretched images in Mail

Sometimes (infrequently) when I send an image in the body of an email in Mail, the image arrives vertically distorted, and appears that way in Mail if the recipient replies, and also appears that way if opened in a photo editing software. Sending the image in a folder seems to solve the problem...

vmug.bc.ca

 

[DaveWT]

Thanks Bruce, Interesting to consider but for me, the newsletter I subscribe to has been "fixed" by the editor, and the one the friend sends me I also have no control on how it is handled. I will try and remember the info you provided in case I can apply it in the future.