PDFkit rendering issue

pdfpreview

I generated a PDF by running pdfTeX on the following source file:

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand\embolden[1]{%
    \special{pdf:literal 2 Tr 8 w}%
    #1%
    \special{pdf:literal 0 Tr 0 w}%
}

\begin{document}
light versus \embolden{heavy}
\end{document}

In Adobe Reader, it renders like this:

enter image description here

But in Preview it renders like this:

enter image description here

Is this considered a bug or a feature? Is there a workaround to force PDFkit applications to render in the same way as the default PDF viewer on other systems? Alternatively, are there any other macOS PDF viewers which do not rely on PDFkit?

Best Answer

This bug appears to have been fixed in the latest macOS update (10.13.4, 17E199).

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