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

101–110 of 326 posts

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#101

Post by thordenmark »

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…

"Why anyone treats PDF as anything but a write-once format is beyond me."

Some of use work in print publishing and being able to edit PDF's is critical.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#102

Post by arthurcolle »

hcurtiss wrote: post #100
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 agree completely. Have you found any good resources for acquiring books in pdf?

LibGen, SciHub

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#103

Post by izacus »

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…

> Why anyone treats PDF as anything but a write-once format is beyond me.

sigh These kind of ignorant statemens really annoy me.

The massive part of PDF spec is dedicated to editable features (annotations, form filling and digital signatures) which are used by massive industries daily because it brings them a lot of value. It's REALLY not that hard to think for a second and remember why having a single file which can be:

- Edited, annotated and commented

- Approved with explicit markers

- Digitally signed by auditors and reviewers with tamper protection

- Rendered on anything that has a semblance of interactive UI with graceful degradation

- Archived on any kind of file storage

is insanely useful and valuable for massive worldwide industries.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#104

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

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…

Here's is one good reason: My company uses digital certificate signing on PDF. It is a very common usage. We have yet to migrate to DocuSign.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#105

Post by aardvark179 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #93
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…

Making a PDF include OCR'd text seems to by definition require writing twice. It has to be edited to add the OCR'd text that was not in the original image-only PDF, no? I mean, you can say that the second PDF is a different PDF that has only been written once, but you can say that about literally any edit, "write once" no longer means anything if you think about it that way.

You can do the OCRing as a part of the original scanning process. You define a blank font and place the letters at the appropriate points to allow text selection. This is also done for documents that use fonts which are not licensed for embedding, it reduces on screen rendering quality slightly as you have lost any hinting information but it’s fine with printing and reserves the intent.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#106

Post by bigbubba »

gfody wrote: post #87
bigbubba wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is there any way to embed raster graphics into an svg? If so, maybe svg could be used as a text-capable container for raster images.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#107

Post by jabbany »

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.

Kind of agree the current title is a bit misleading.

I've never used any editing features in Preview (I mean it's called "preview" so...) and reading the title I thought this meant it was mangling files even by opening them which would have been super scary.

As for non-Acrobat software mangling PDFs after editing... Well that's much less surprising. I've even had Acrobat mangle stuff in PDFs after editing...

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#108

Post by djxfade »

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.

I wouldn't be to sure, Apple's applications usually rely heavily on proprietary Cocoa APIs not available anywhere else

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#110

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #93
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…

Making a PDF include OCR'd text seems to by definition require writing twice. It has to be edited to add the OCR'd text that was not in the original image-only PDF, no? I mean, you can say that the second PDF is a different PDF that has only been written once, but you can say that about literally any edit, "write once" no longer means anything if you think about it that way.

PDF does support appending to the file and it’s not just for adding pages. You can make changes throughout the original document.

I’m not sure that is what Preview does though.

Post reply on HN