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Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

annoying.technology

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Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#21

Post by xxpor »

Why anyone treats PDF as anything but a write-once format is beyond me. It's so finicky that I'm not shocked bugs like this happen. The only programs I'd be reasonable sure wouldn't screw it up are Acrobat itself, and pdflatex and friends.

I think we need a multi-image container format. It could be something that's literally a bunch of jpgs/pngs/pick your poison in a tar container, and given a new extension. OSes would open it and present it as a gallery in order. There's no value in a non-ocr'd PDF existing. For OCR'd text that gets more complicated, but it feels like we should be able to come up with a common denominator that doesn't have the legacy of a binary format derived from postscript in the early 90s.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#22

Post by bigbubba »

mhh__ wrote: 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.

I've been looking for a FOSS desktop agnostic universal file previewer or thumbnail generator for a while now; if anybody has suggestions I'd love to hear them. Ffmpegthumbnailer for video thumbnails or imagemagick for image thumbnails are fine, but what about previews for things like ebooks or PDFs? Something that provides a one-stop-shop for as many common filetypes as possible is what I'm looking for.

My current solution is controlling a floating mpv window to open image, video or audio files as they are selected. This works well for A/V but not so well with other sorts of documents.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#24

Post by mhh__ »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #15
mhh__ wrote: 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.

How? I assume it's mostly using proprietary MacOS APIs, and, ignoring that it doesn't really matter beyond apple being an abusive partner, lawyers are a powerful tool (This software is under the Apple don't take the piss licence)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#25

Post by arvindamirtaa »

zepto wrote: post #19
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 main…

> "They are using software unsupported by the vendor and blaming Apple for the outcome."

But by this logic, no software other than those that Apple sells you directly (their own or through the MAS) is "supported software". If Apple makes a change and all of them break rendering it useless of anyone using software not bought from them, would you still be making this same apology?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#26

Post by jcrawfordor »

zepto wrote: 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…

So Preview opens a file, which is apparently valid per Preview (Preview handles and displays it correctly). After changes, preview then saves a file that is not valid per Preview (OCR text layer is corrupted).

It is very difficult for me construe a situation in which this would not be considered errata in Preview. Even if ABBYY is writing unusual PDFs, it's popular enough software that this issue will be encountered in the real world multiple times. Having to deal with unusually formed PDFs is just a general trait of writing PDF software. If you consider it a non-issue that your software writes corrupt PDFs when the same situation is handled correctly by Acrobat, no matter how unjust you feel the cruel world to be, you should not be in the PDF business. There's a reason most PDF viewers only present a highly constrained feature set, and it's because writing a capable PDF editor is very difficult. Apple has decided they are up to the challenge, and in this case has failed.

As a general rule, if your software package opens a file fine, then writes a broken version of it, seems to all the world like a bug in your software package.

The idea that this behavior in a PDF reader can be excused because the software that generated the PDF was not approved for the operating system the viewer is running on per the vendor... kind of stretches credulity. I don't usually inquire as the OS used to generate the PDF when I receive one.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#27

Post by crazygringo »

I work with a ton of PDF's between my Mac and iPad, and it mostly works but there are still just way too many bugs.

It's a lot of little things, like in Catalina where opening up the sidebar for annotations (comments) seemingly randomized their order. (Big Sur, fortunately, fixed it to be page-order again.)

Or how printing a PDF from a website (in Catalina, also seemingly fixed in Big Sur) would look right on the page... but if you copied and pasted the text from the PDF to somewhere else, something like 10% of the glyphs were scrambled ("lik3 thZs"), like some sort of character table corruption.

Or reading a PDF with Books on my iPad, maybe 10% of the time bookmarking a page... doesn't bookmark it. Or removing a bookmark... doesn't remove it. Or a handful of highlights you just made have inexplicably disappeared the next time you open the file.

Or whenever you open the PDF in Books it remembers which page you were on. Except sometimes it doesn't, so you can't really rely on that for saving your place.

Or in Books, if you select some text to copy but accidentally hit the adjacent "select all" in the pop-up menu, and you're dealing with a 400-page PDF, it just locks up and you have to restart it.

Or in Preview if you want to convert a PDF to black-and-white, there's an option for it but your PDF will balloon in filesize to 10x larger or something.

I mean, I could go on and on. It's weird, because Preview is an incredible app, really. But it really is like they build it and then never bother to test if basic workflows reliably work.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#28

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

r00fus wrote: post #16
matrixagent wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's unrelated to OCR, but there have been other Preview issues. We ran into an issue a few years ago where saving a PDF with forms in Preview would set some style setting so that in most other readers, the form fields would have no background color and use white text, making them unreadable. They were still perfectly readable in Preview, but had the style issues in Chrome, Firefox, Acrobat (and Reader), and Foxit. We have a project where we programatically fill in PDF forms using PDFtk and one day, our editor just starting spitting out empty PDFs. After troubleshooting, we traced it back to the style changes Preview was making after another dev had accidentally done a CMD+S on the template file and committed the template.

In short: NEVER save a PDF with Preview. You should probably just avoid opening it in Preview period, frankly.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#29

Post by arvindamirtaa »

mhh__ wrote: post #24
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

How? I assume it's mostly using proprietary MacOS APIs, and, ignoring that it doesn't really matter beyond apple being an abusive partner, lawyers are a powerful tool ( This software is under the Apple don't take the piss licence )

Assuming the License is that restrictive, only those who are financially invested in Preview working well (and only on macOS) will have any incentive to contribute code.

I can't think of any company other than Apple that fit this description.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#30

Post by [deleted] »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #15
mhh__ wrote: 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.

[deleted]
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