Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

annoying.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 326 posts

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#81

Post by gpm »

krn wrote: post #74
gpm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've really been enjoying a remarkable tablet since I got it a few weeks ago. Great for taking notes, great for reading pdf's (and scribbling on them - which is surprisingly useful!), terrible for literally anything else.

> terrible for literally anything else I hope it will soon be the best e-reader on the market, thanks to KOReader[1]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jsb3r7/ko...

Hopefully, but I don't like counting features before they exist.

A feature that does exist - and I maybe should have mentioned, is that one of my house mates finds it really useful for remote teaching, they screen share the remarkables screen to their students and use it as something like a blackboard.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#82

Post by inetknght »

crazygringo wrote: post #27

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 pag…

> 10% of the glyphs were scrambled ("lik3 thZs"), like some sort of character table corruption.

As I understand it, that's a form copy protection trying to prevent exactly what you're doing.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#83

Post by Wowfunhappy »

inetknght wrote: post #54
systemvoltage wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. 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 a…

> 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.

You can basically avoid this problem by only opening PDFs in programs like Preview and Evince, and never Acrobat.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#84

Post by lisper »

fastball wrote: post #51
lisper wrote: post #46

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.

What? You can definitely downgrade to an earlier MacOS. It's not a one-click downgrade like the upgrade is, but I don't know of any OS with that feature.

> You can definitely downgrade to an earlier MacOS.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. Going from Mavericks to Yosemite for example is one-way because it includes a non-backwards-compatible firmware update. Going to Catalina is also one-way because it changes the file system from HFS to AFS.

And iOS is famously non-downgradable.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#85

Post by ztravis »

My guess is that the output PDF is still valid, but that an embedded (subset) font has had its `ToUnicode` map stripped, so that there's no link between the character codes used in the text elements and the "actual" characters they represent (there are also other ways this corruption could happen, but dropping or mangling the `ToUnicode` map seems like a likely cause).

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#86

Post by sildur »

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…

Blind and shortsighted people may not like your idea. There are accessibility options in PDF, but even a regular one can be accessed with a screen reader. Your images won't.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#87

Post by gfody »

bigbubba wrote: post #35
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 or…

you can also embed images and fonts in svg, probably not as reliable as pdf for pixel-perfect reproductions everywhere though

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#88

Post by crazygringo »

_-david-_ wrote: post #58
crazygringo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of those require modifying the existing document. A new document could be produced and the existing document(s) would only be read from.

Oh. Well, I mean... sometimes it's just easier to "Save" rather than "Save As"? (Or on macOS now, "Save" rather than "Duplicate" then "Save".)

It's supposed to be a valid assumption that re-saving a lossless document in its native format won't destroy parts you haven't touched.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#89

Post by zepto »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #77
zepto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re a victim of ABBYY’s poor PDF generation, that’s what. Nothing excuses ABBYY if their PDFs are corrupt.

Hahaha this is just brilliant.

It’s not brilliant. It’s just correct if ABBYY is producing corrupt PDFs, which is a possible cause of this problem.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#90

Post by rsfinn »

gpm wrote: post #50
ketamine__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What device do you use to read PDF's?

I've really been enjoying a remarkable tablet since I got it a few weeks ago. Great for taking notes, great for reading pdf's (and scribbling on them - which is surprisingly useful!), terrible for literally anything else.

That does sound like a remarkable tablet. What's it called?

(...oh, now I get it: https://remarkable.com/>)

Post reply on HN