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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

#31

Post by function_seven »

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…

> 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.

I think it is. Preview used to correctly handle the thing, and now it doesn't. Users cannot be expected to inspect the raw PS code of their PDFs to determine standards compliance. What they can do is assume that something that works yesterday, and appears to work today, is in fact working.

The PDFs didn't change, the application did. It's the application's fault.

If you have compatible behavior that you remove, it's on you to alert the user of the reduced functionality.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#32

Post by zepto »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #25
zepto wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No this is not correct.

ABBY hasn’t updated their software for Big Sur, i.e. ABBY themselves say it hasn’t been updated yet and is not supported by them on Big Sur.

That’s what unsupported means. It has nothing to do with whether Apple supports it.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#34

Post by db48x »

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…

Are you arguing that ABBYY Finereader is going to produce different PDF files once they support the new OS? Possibly they will, if only to work around this obvious bug in Preview.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#35

Post by bigbubba »

xxpor wrote: post #21

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 wou…

In many industries, writable PDFs are commonplace and aren't seen to be a problem because people in those industries don't see any problem with using Acrobat. If you want to unseat Acrobat and PDF, I think you'll have to provide something that has equivalent or greater power.

As for multi-image container formats, I think we already have that: cbz/cbr. Just a zip or rar archive with images in it, to be displayed in order by name. This 'format' is in common use already for scans of comic books. There are numerous viewers you can use to open and browse these files. Something to consider though; accessibility. A screen reader needs to use OCR to read these files to people with impaired vision. PDF files aren't fantastic for screen readers either, but they're much better than just a JPEG. I'd love to see some sort of subtitle system for images (I think mpv could probably overlay a subtitle sidecar on a still image, but that's not widely supported. Text-based subtitles formats are easy to wire into text to speech though.)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#36

Post by systemvoltage »

xxpor wrote: post #21

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 wou…

PDF is one of the best things IMO - it's like a docker container for documents. The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.

For example, I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi. I want to rely on professional typesetting from the publishers, not some front-end engineer's vision of what the ebook should look like and how it should be presented to the user. It works only for novels and long form reading where typesetting is not critical. Basically any book that also has a good audiobook version works fine with epub/mobi since visual formatting is a non-issue. For everything else - programming books to research papers, PDF is great. Can PDF format be improved? Sure, but the level of adoption and its widespread use is more important than fixing copy paste and content migration aspects of PDFs.

What I absolutely DO NOT WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. That IMO defeats the purpose of what the container is supposed to do, i.e. contain and not leak. It should most definitely have fixed physical dimensions (or pixels).

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#37

Post by refulgentis »

avalys wrote: post #23

This is a clickbait, sensationalist headline. “Saving a PDF with Preview in Big Sur can corrupt OCR text added by a third-party program” is more accurate.

In my very humble opinion, it's accurate: "Saving a PDF with Preview in Big Sur [Preview in Big Sur] can corrupt OCR text added by a third-party program [is irreversibly destroying PDFs]"

I understand the (fairly common, in these comments) viewpoint that this is the fault of the "third-party program", but since the PDF is readable up until Preview touches it...I find it hard to come around to the viewpoint the third-party program is relevant. Readable bytes -> Preview -> unreadable bytes is my mental model so far.

Edit: absolutely unacceptable this is downvoted to -4. I've observed for a couple months that participation in Apple-related threads, outside indignation that Apple was involved in the discussion at all, gets down to -5 before getting back to -1 a day or two later. No matter what tone is used, this happens, and it makes the problem even worse in the long run. Been here 10 years, always been a _slight_ problem, but over the last year, it's virtually impossible to participate without continuing to slowly destroy my 11 year old account. Not sure how much longer I can keep trying.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#38

Post by arvindamirtaa »

zepto wrote: post #32
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

No this is not correct. ABBY hasn’t updated their software for Big Sur, i.e. ABBY themselves say it hasn’t been updated yet and is not supported by them on Big Sur. That’s what unsupported means. It has nothing to do with whether Apple supports it.

I receive that PDF file that looks like any other PDF file.

I open it with preview. It opens fine. I close it and open it again. It opens fine.

I open it a third time and make a small arrow pointing to something and save it (as I would with ANY OTHER PDF).

It breaks.

I'm not using ABBYY. I've never heard of it. It's not on my system. It's just a PDF file that I got sent.

Now what?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#39

Post by ihuman »

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 mad that the pdf’s their scanner produces don’t work properly

The PDF that FineReader made worked properly. The one that Preview made didn't.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#40

Post by db48x »

xxpor wrote: post #21

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 wou…

There are already a handful of multi-image container formats. They're all images inside zipfiles, of course.
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