51–60 of 326 posts
Using Apple devices in general seems like a total crap shoot to me nowadays because of the impossibility of down-grading the OS. Every "upgrade" comes with a considerable risk that something that had been working will stop working, and if that happens, you are pretty much SOL.
It's not a one-click downgrade like the upgrade is, but I don't know of any OS with that feature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-…
Preview isn’t breaking files by reading them, as I understand it, people are saving files with Preview and over-writing their ABBY compatible pdf. Just because the last four bytes of a file name is “.pdf” doesn’t mean anything that opens files with that suffix will work. PDF is not a bitmap, it’s a script like HTML or JS. People understand browser incompatibility but some how this is unconscionable.
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's not clear if the issue is caused by the PDF files produced by ABBYY, or if the issue is also present in other OCR'ed PDF files.
In either case, Preview shouldn't silently corrupt the file. It could display an error saying that it was unable to save the file, or a warning that some data couldn't be saved, so that the user can check if the file still works for them after saving.
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 a…
I, on the other hand, do not whatsoever trust publishers. PDF runs software and that means that everything under the sun including malware and DRM can run on PDF -- and indeed that has occurred many times. It should be a non-starter for anyone who actually values the ability to read their content on any device they want.
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.
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…
> 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,…
But, there is no evidence yet that they removed anything.
It’s quite possible (I’d say likely) that ABBY’s PDFs were corrupt all along.
Preview may have tolerated them not because of a special feature which was then removed, but because it happened not to depend on correctness before.
In this case, Apple wouldn’t have been in a position to even know about the problem.
You know who would? ABBY, who have had free access to Big Sur for months. You’d think that even cursory testing at their end would have shown this problem.
They have had months to fix it, months to work with Apple on the issue, any months to publicize it it really is Apple’s fault.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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…
Because you often have no choice. You have a PDF of a book and you need to export the pages of a single chapter to a new PDF. Or you have 30 different PDF's that you need to combine into a single one. Or a full-color large-filesize scanned PDF that you need to convert to a smaller-sized black-and-white one. Or you need to copy quotes from a PDF to paste somewhere else. I could go on... PDF's are documents, and normal…
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 a…
cries in random PDFs that end up being printed with letters spaced by 1 cm