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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

#211

Post by duskwuff »

arthur2e5 wrote: post #193
duskwuff wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost certainly it. I've seen similar issues with copy/paste from poorly constructed PDFs, often ones generated by "print to PDF" features.

Very old LaTeX PDFs tend to have this issue too. Chances are pretty slim for profs to edit PDFs witb Preview, I think…

Yep, and in that case it's because those PDFs were often generated through really horrifying pipelines (e.g. TeX to DVI to PS to PDF). Under some workflows, the resulting document wouldn't even contain any characters, as far as PDF was concerned -- it'd just be a bunch of vectors.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#213

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#214

Post by schaefer »

lilactown wrote: post #147
crazygringo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally use an iPad. It's amazing for it. Especially when you use the Apple Pencil to highlight text, make annotations like circles or question marks, etc.

I struggled to find good software for this. Is there a specific app you recommend?

On the iPad, I use goodnotes for that. You can import PDFs and then mark them up.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#215

Post by simion314 »

kall wrote: post #196
systemvoltage wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are web pages/archives really less fixed than PDFs if you don‘t want want them to be? I mean I know they are in practice, but I don‘t see why you couldn‘t use them as a fixed document format. Some contracts may need to be upheld between creator and consumer. If the consumer doesn‘t want to, well, that‘s freedom, isn’t it? Of course it is the most code executing document format to ever execute code, so if that was the…

>Are web pages/archives really less fixed than PDFs if you don‘t want want them to be? I mean I know they are in practice, but I don‘t see why you couldn‘t use them as a fixed document format.

Web content is not that fixed, same code can redner different in different browsers this is why sometimes we need to use some css reset rules to attempt to make stuff render as similar as possible.

What is great with PDF it that it should look and print the same everywhere, I always have issues withfor example .doc files that don't look and print the same on my machine as the sender one and it is just a few lines of normal text, nothing fancy.

So a PDF replacer should be identical on all machines this means a extremely strict specifications with no place where implementation could deviate a pixel.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#216

Post by helmholtz »

yarcob wrote: post #177
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...

I'm not sure how widely you've sampled the field on Windows, but in case you don't know it, I can recommend PDF-Xchange Editor. They forced it upon us at my workplace and it seemed dodgy as hell at first. But I've been using it steadily and now I really like it. I'm a paper-free researcher so I no longer print research papers. Instead, I annotate/highlight/comment using this software, and it's worked so well that I've installed it on my personal machine as well.

I've tried all of the commands you've mentioned, and so far it's worked without a hitch.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#217

Post by ValentineC »

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.

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

Except some bank forms won't work [1], because someone, at some point in history, thought it was a great idea to embed phone-home DRM and "security" into PDFs.

[1] e.g. this form from Standard Chartered https://av.sc.com/sg/content/docs/BusinessBankingSmartAccoun...

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#218

Post by caminocorner »

birdyrooster wrote: post #41
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.

Did they save the file using Preview? If so that’s on them, they chose to write a pdf using Preview and that comes with all of the pitfalls of pdf compatibility. Does plain old PostScript have this problem?

I'm not the original author. The usecase I have for Preview is to open it up, read it, highlight a few things and save the file (with the new highlight overlays). I wouldn't expect that to destroy my underlying OCR (which I also use a 3rd party app for)

If the behavior changes, that's not on me, that's on Preview.

I don't have any issue with this today on my Mac, but I'm glad I didn't upgrade to BigSur. I almost did.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#219

Post by dkonofalski »

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…

Those things are literally not possible to happen without your intervention... ಠ_ಠ

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#220

Post by Terretta »

wtallis wrote: post #186
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…

> 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. Sounds like you want the PDF/A standard for archiving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A It forbids embedding audio and video and JavaScript, requires embedding all the fonts, forbids encryption and patent-encumbered comp…

That PDF/A URL surprised me.

Curiously, Wikipedia doesn't think it's a page or a subpage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:...

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