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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

#111

Post by matrixagent »

zepto wrote: post #20
matrixagent wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read it again. This bug could hit you without ever using ABBYY yourself. Apple broke Preview.

I read it. It doesn’t show that Apple broke Preview. It says Preview stopped being compatible with PDF’s produced by ABBYY. Those PDFs could have been buggy all along, and only now be showing up due to improvements in preview. It’s possible that Apple broke preview, but having seen how poorly maintained ABBYY is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was producing malformed PDFs that just happened to work on older version of…

I honestly don't care who is exactly at fault. I definitely blame Apple for destroying the PDF. There might be plenty of blame left for ABBYY for creating a bad PDF in the first place. That does not change how utterly unacceptable Preview.app's behavior here is. If you honestly think there is no valid criticism for Apple here, I don't know what to tell you. In any case, the whole thing is annoying technology – and seeing some of the comments here, people should more often try to step out of their own mind bubble and try to look at these things form their grandparents' or similar perspective. I personally am very aware of plenty of ways to work around this issue. But Apple used to be the company you could use if you either are not or don't want to be concerned about things like that.

And a quick edit: I really dislike people who discuss like you do – all of what I just wrote is already stated in the post itself. Another commenter even called you out for ignoring that part when quoting me. I should not have wasted five minutes spelling it out for you again, your mind won't be changed anyway.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#113

Post by e40 »

fastball wrote: post #76
e40 wrote: post #67

Let's be real. Every single macOS release, until it reaches x.y.4 or x.y.5 is just in beta and you are the tester. I upgraded to Catalina when it hit 10.15.6, and I watched for the year since the release all the comments and posts about the horrible things it was doing to their computer, files, apps, etc. Apple supports the latest 2 versions of macOS. Always be on the "previous" one is my advice. Since my family and…

Is that not like, every piece of software ever? I don't know very many pieces of widely used / actively developed software that stayed static on X.0.0 for more than a couple weeks after release or so.

No, it's not. I knew I'd get downvotes. Don't mind. I don't say this about macOS lightly. I've been using it since 10.0.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#114

Post by ihuman »

zepto wrote: post #73
ihuman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you know it worked properly?

The first paragraph and image in the article. When the author copied the text from FineReader's PDF and pasted it in TextEdit, it had the correct text. When the author tried that with preview's pdf, it pasted garbled data.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#115

Post by bigbubba »

sildur wrote: post #86
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.

It's also generally a pain in the ass for people with good vision too, since text can't be copied out of a JPEG. If you want to forward a paragraph of text from a pure raster document, you have to read and type it all out yourself.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#116

Post by Jtsummers »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #49
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…

That not remembering the last page you were at in Books drives me crazy. My iPad would be the perfect device for reading PDF books especially technical and maths text books, if weren't for the Chinese torture of whether it will remember your page the next time you open it or will I have to scroll through until I recall where I left.

I've been a happy GoodReader user for years. Syncs with a variety of sources, remembers where I was, bookmarks work. Annotations work, but I don't use that much beyond being able to say it works.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#117

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #83
inetknght wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really:

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/23592/Gnome-Evince.html

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#118

Post by gedy »

bigbubba wrote: post #106
gfody wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, data urls in image tag. (Not sure how practical that is for file size)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#119

Post by duskwuff »

zepto wrote: post #78
jfim wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 unabl…

PDF’s are essentially a stack machine based program. It’s not clear what’s causing the problem, but verifying correctness of programs is not a solved computer science problem.

PDF is not a stack machine. This is a common misconception.

PostScript was a stack machine with included operators which implemented a set of vector graphics commands. PDF has a similar rendering pipeline, but it renders a set of primitives described directly in the document -- there is no virtual machine involved.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#120

Post by matrixagent »

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.

I personally don't use anything else, but when the problem first occured a few years ago, it was not limited to PDFs from ABBYY. (Which is not to say that it's purely Preview.app's fault. Maybe all of these PDFs were created in a bad way, would not surprise me at all. Could very well be that Preview.app is actually "improving" and fixing old bugs/cruft, breaking things that worked before but never should have in the first place. As the end user that doesn't really matter for me though, as I said in the post itself.)
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