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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

#171

Post by richard_todd »

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…

There are lots of image-container formats. DjVu is my favorite, and supports OCR text annotations also. But, outside of some niches, it has fallen out of use these days. Adobe closed the quality gap by adding jbig2 and jpeg2000 support to PDF, making it possible to build a "bunch of images" PDF with similar quality to DjVu.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#172

Post by dkonofalski »

ihuman wrote: post #39
zepto wrote: post #19

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…

> 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.

That doesn't mean it's a valid PDF. Preview has error correction to try and recover document data when metadata is corrupt. It's entirely possible that the documents have always had corrupt metadata and that Preview now expects stricter PDF guidelines.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#174

Post by virgilp »

TwoBit wrote: post #121
izacus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And yet PDF re-writing keeps getting screwed up. Probably because it really is a bad format for this, with the pages of docs notwithstanding.

I never saw these screw-ups in Acrobat, so maybe the problem is not the format, but Apple?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#175

Post by matrixagent »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #157
matrixagent wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Fair enough, though I'd still argue that a public write-up that might warn a few people and save them the trouble is well worth writing on its own. As this blog is just a hobby, my time for it is limited and it's not like a write-up like this doesn't already take up some time. I did provide plenty of resources in the links, to which I don't think sample PDFs from me would add much value. But point taken, I'll try to attach sample data where applicable in the future.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#177

Post by yarcob »

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…

Basic PDF editing (adding, removing, reordering, cropping and rotating) has been rock solid in Apple's Preview app. It's something that I dearly miss when I'm on Windows.

Which makes showstopper bugs like this a very unfortunate.

But then again, it's been common knowledge that you shouldn't upgrade to a .0 release...

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#178

Post by dec0dedab0de »

tjohns wrote: post #149
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/23592/Gnome-Evince.html

Having vulnerabilities is never great. However, this is a separate issue from whether the PDF reader explicitly allows code execution or supports some of the more obscure PDF extensions, which is what the parent was talking about.

isnt including fonts basically code execution in and of itself?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#179

Post by Igelau »

izacus wrote: post #103
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…

le sigh the surface changes you're talking about are small potatoes compared to removing a page and altering document structure without breaking anything.
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