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Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

annoying.technology

11–20 of 326 posts

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#11
Preview seems like a good example of something that's worth open sourcing. Not only will people end up doing work for you, you get eyes on the code and more direct issue tracking.

Consumers get a product and they still have to go on Mac to use it.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#12

Preview should not change the file on disk. I would expect it to open the original file as read-only.

Yes, the author says it's "the result after modifying (removed a blank page) and saving that same PDF in Preview." So it's not enough to just view the file in Preview.app I take it, but you need to save it out (which still shouldn't strip anything extra, obviously, but is not what I thought was being claimed).

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#14

anyone else not able to see sufficient details the tiny screenshots? What was the difference?

The difference to look for is between the top half on the right vs the bottom half on the right. The text has been scrambled into random symbols.

Here's a direct link to the 2,240x939 image: https://annoying.technology/media/previeweatingpdfs.png

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#15
post #11

Preview seems like a good example of something that's worth open sourcing. Not only will people end up doing work for you, you get eyes on the code and more direct issue tracking. Consumers get a product and they still have to go on Mac to use it.

>Consumers get a product and they still have to go on Mac to use it.

There will be ports to windows and linux in under a month.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#16
post #2

They are using software unsupported by the vendor and blaming Apple for the outcome. “ABBYY says they don’t support Big Sur yet, that’s fine. But Apple didn’t tell me that I can’t upgrade to Big Sur when I use ABBYY. I’d be a lot less angry if there was a changelog or release notes from Apple where it says there is a known problem with OCR’ed PDFs in Preview. Their software is broken, they need to tell me. I don’t ca…

Read it again. This bug could hit you without ever using ABBYY yourself. Apple broke Preview.

So is there an active Preview corruption example that doesn't involve ABBYY? I've used FineReader before for a commercial effort, I do remember it being very finicky.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#18

Preview should not change the file on disk. I would expect it to open the original file as read-only.

> In the lower half is the result after modifying (removed a blank page) and saving that same PDF in Preview.

I don't think this means Preview changes the files just by opening them.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#19
post #2

They are using software unsupported by the vendor and blaming Apple for the outcome. “ABBYY says they don’t support Big Sur yet, that’s fine. But Apple didn’t tell me that I can’t upgrade to Big Sur when I use ABBYY. I’d be a lot less angry if there was a changelog or release notes from Apple where it says there is a known problem with OCR’ed PDFs in Preview. Their software is broken, they need to tell me. I don’t ca…

Here's the rest of the statement that you left out that answers your point. "...I just need my OS to keep working for me. This bug could hit me without even owning a scanner at all – someone sending me a PDF that I then unknowingly break before archiving it. That’s the part I’m mad about."

It doesn’t really. Firstly, that’s not what they are mad about, since that hasn’t actually happened to them. They are mad that the pdf’s their scanner produces don’t work properly.

And secondly, that hypothetical could well be using broken software too. We really don’t know how bad the PDF’s ABBY produces are, but as someone who owned this scanner and the software, it’s fairly obvious that the software is barely maintained.

It really isn’t Apple’s fault if someone else is producing bad files that they happened to previously tolerate, especially if that somebody isn’t maintaining their software.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#20
post #2

They are using software unsupported by the vendor and blaming Apple for the outcome. “ABBYY says they don’t support Big Sur yet, that’s fine. But Apple didn’t tell me that I can’t upgrade to Big Sur when I use ABBYY. I’d be a lot less angry if there was a changelog or release notes from Apple where it says there is a known problem with OCR’ed PDFs in Preview. Their software is broken, they need to tell me. I don’t ca…

Read it again. This bug could hit you without ever using ABBYY yourself. Apple broke Preview.

I read it. It doesn’t show that Apple broke Preview. It says Preview stopped being compatible with PDF’s produced by ABBYY.

Those PDFs could have been buggy all along, and only now be showing up due to improvements in preview.

It’s possible that Apple broke preview, but having seen how poorly maintained ABBYY is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was producing malformed PDFs that just happened to work on older version of preview.

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