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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

#151

Post by dkonofalski »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #26
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…

So Preview opens a file, which is apparently valid per Preview (Preview handles and displays it correctly). After changes, preview then saves a file that is not valid per Preview (OCR text layer is corrupted). It is very difficult for me construe a situation in which this would not be considered errata in Preview. Even if ABBYY is writing unusual PDFs, it's popular enough software that this issue will be encountered…

If this is a bug with Preview, then that's really, really bad since Preview is a bedrock of macOS and has been for years.

However... it sounds like the issue is that FineReader is storing the OCR'd text in the metadata in a way that's not part of the official PDF spec. So, it sounds like Preview is able to open the file by ignoring that metadata and then, upon save, is storing the metadata back, as normal, which then corrupts the OCR data. This reminds me a lot of when people would store metadata like this in MP3 files to include things like album art and booklets. Normal mp3 players would ignore it as just metadata or bogus data but opening it in an audio editor would do this same thing.

I'm not sure who the "blame" lies with in this case because Abby FineReader probably is writing this stuff in a non-supported way but Preview really should just ignore it rather than trying to correct it. It's very likely that the OCR text, post-save, is actually bits from the document itself rather than from the metadata.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#152

Post by Ar-Curunir »

cjsawyer wrote: post #139
ernst_klim wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi PDF is abysmal for books though. 1) You can't scale fonts to fit various screen sizes. 2) It's waaay more expensive to interpret and render, so it affects battery life.

And yet, I prefer it. Textbooks in any other format are miserable to read.

Textbooks are different from other kinds of books in that you have formulae and figures that can't easily be reflowed.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#153

Post by systemvoltage »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #128
systemvoltage wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many other formats, a myriad of text formats from asciidocs to markdown. For embedded devices and such, they work great I presume. Please don't mess with PDFs. 20+ year old technology that is shitty but works, I prefer keeping the status-quo.

If PDF had an "accident", and someone was able to do to it what Steve Jobs did to Flash, I would be very happy.

Are there any other "fixed" or "docker-like" formats for documents besides PDFs that solves a lot of problems with PDF format? From what I understand, PDF is an xml based document standard.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#154

Post by matrixagent »

ehutch79 wrote: post #80

Apple has a lot of shit they need to fix in macOS and the accompanying apps. That said, the author of this article is clearly an ass, and i have a hard time being sympathetic. Assuming the pdf is actually in spec, which it's probably not, this shouldn't be happening. That said, if the 3rd party app vendor says the pdfs they generate are broken in big sur, that should tell you, they may be broken other places as well,…

Could you explain why or how exactly I'm an ass?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#155

Post by ASalazarMX »

monocasa wrote: post #43
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…

The comic book piracy community in fact does have what you're asking for. The formats .cbz, .cbr, etc. are just zip and rar files respectively, with images inside and a standard format for the internal filenames so they're presented in order by your reader. Would love something like that with svg allowed inside to support vector drawings.

And this has become the de facto open standard, supported by many document viewers, probably because it's a very straightforward combination of two widely used tools.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#156

Post by cle »

mulmen wrote: post #134

I have learned to be scared of my MacBook. Seemingly safe behavior can cause permanent damage. It does completely unexpected things, apparently by design. I do not put my pictures in the ~/Pictures directory for fear of what the newest app will do to “improve” them for me. I fully expect it to apply lossy compression to my files without asking. This is after Photos or whatever it was called at the time mangled the da…

I have run into that Messages fat-finger-delete multiple times, it is infuriating! I still don't know what the key combination is, but IIRC the confirmation defaults to "Delete" when enter or space are pressed, which are...quite common when sending short messages.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#157

Post by JumpCrisscross »

matrixagent wrote: post #142
lilyball wrote: post #71

I find posts like this completely pointless when they include no details at all. This is just "there's an incompatibility between third-party software and a version of macOS that the third-party software says they don't support yet, so I'm going to publicly criticize Apple". If you're not going to do the work to figure out what the corruption is, at least include the two PDFs so other people can look at them and see…

> If you're not going to do the work to figure out what the corruption is … I'm sorry, but last time I checked neither Apple nor ABBYY pay my salary. I really don't understand these takes. If Apple or ABBYY want my PDFs, they should be able to find my email address rather easily. Your tl;dr version of the post is completely unfair. I publicly criticize Apple because they are breaking something that potentially affect…

> neither Apple nor ABBYY pay my salary

This is a fair bar for conversation, in person or online. One can be more demanding of a public write-up.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#158

Post by systemvoltage »

ernst_klim wrote: post #136
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 personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi PDF is abysmal for books though. 1) You can't scale fonts to fit various screen sizes. 2) It's waaay more expensive to interpret and render, so it affects battery life.

1) That's a feature, not a bug :)

2) Agreed, but that's a challenge for the engineers, not something we should blame the user for. Users have unequivocally spoken (Look up reviews for epub programming books on Amazon, usually they just want a PDF).

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#159

Post by ihuman »

zepto wrote: post #146
ihuman wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t file corruption.

I never said anything about file corruption. You asked how I know FineReader worked properly, and I explained why the article showed it working properly, and that preview doesn't work properly anymore.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#160

Post by zepto »

matrixagent wrote: post #111
zepto wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

With all due respect, if you had led with your “footnote”, you wouldn’t have even been able to write such an angry sounding piece. Also, you say that you don’t care who is at fault, but that isn’t how the piece came off. It’s odd you’d say that now.

I quoted you because you hadn’t incorporated this key information into the main text.

What I think is that there are many ill-formed PDFs out there and that supporting the intersection of all of them is essentially impossible.

I also think that it’s every bit the responsibility of a company like ABBY to generate good PDFs. How can it not be? Relying on Preview to be forgiving when you are a maker of PDF generation software is obviously irresponsible.

Why do you think ABBY didn’t announce that this problem existed when the Big Sur betas were available for them to test with?

For what it’s worth, I stopped recommending Fujitsu scanners years ago. For a while I loved mine, but none of the software was well maintained.

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