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

231–240 of 326 posts

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#231

Post by omnimus »

odyssey7 wrote: post #208
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…

Knuth as a book author has written about this on his website. “Warning: Unfortunately, however, non-PDF versions have also appeared, against my recommendations, and those versions are frankly quite awful. A great deal of expertise and care is necessary to do the job right. If you have been misled into purchasing one of these inferior versions (for example, a Kindle edition), the publishers have told me that they will…

But thats such a specific example. Math books have so much complex notation and wierd inline elements... he had to invent TeX for that. HTML/CSS wouldn't handle it.

Basically for all normal texbooks you will want epub as digital format. And if you have lot of ilustrations or wierd format book then just get the printed version.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#232

Post by sn41 »

There was something in macos Catalina that broke mupdf on my macbook pro. The view would occupy the lower left corner of the window, and something was clipping the view to the lower quadrant.

I tried installing from source, changing the gl library etc. But it was the same.

Am done with Apple for now. M1 is a bit tempting, but I guess I will wait for the technology to mature, buy a Macbook Air, and run Linux on it.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#233

Post by ehutch79 »

matrixagent wrote: post #154
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?

To quote:

"""But Apple didn’t tell me that I can’t upgrade to Big Sur when I use ABBYY"""

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#234

Post by tekacs »

cle wrote: post #156
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.

They've finally removed the keyboard shortcut for this in Big Sur. :)

It was Cmd + Delete/Backspace before.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#235

Post by ehutch79 »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #38
zepto wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is not correct. ABBY hasn’t updated their software for Big Sur, i.e. ABBY themselves say it hasn’t been updated yet and is not supported by them on Big Sur. That’s what unsupported means. It has nothing to do with whether Apple supports it.

I receive that PDF file that looks like any other PDF file. I open it with preview. It opens fine. I close it and open it again. It opens fine. I open it a third time and make a small arrow pointing to something and save it (as I would with ANY OTHER PDF). It breaks. I'm not using ABBYY. I've never heard of it. It's not on my system. It's just a PDF file that I got sent. Now what?

Someone buys a bottle coke

They shake it up a lot

They hand me said bottle of coke

I open it, and get sprayed by fizz

THAT IS CLEARLY THE COCA-COLA COMPANIES FAULT!

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#236

Post by ehutch79 »

matrixagent wrote: post #4
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…

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

but the file was stuff generated with abbyy, even if you give it to someone else.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#237

Post by ehutch79 »

ehutch79 wrote: post #235
arvindamirtaa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I receive that PDF file that looks like any other PDF file. I open it with preview. It opens fine. I close it and open it again. It opens fine. I open it a third time and make a small arrow pointing to something and save it (as I would with ANY OTHER PDF). It breaks. I'm not using ABBYY. I've never heard of it. It's not on my system. It's just a PDF file that I got sent. Now what?

Someone buys a bottle coke They shake it up a lot They hand me said bottle of coke I open it, and get sprayed by fizz THAT IS CLEARLY THE COCA-COLA COMPANIES FAULT!

To be clear, my point here is that just because something is handed off, does not mean it's existence is reset or something.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#238

Post by matrixagent »

ehutch79 wrote: post #233
matrixagent wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To quote: """But Apple didn’t tell me that I can’t upgrade to Big Sur when I use ABBYY"""

This is at least the second time that Apple breaks Preview in this way. I outlined why this bug is something a lot of users could run into, and I even mention that I'm not necessarily holding it against them that it breaks, but specifically that they don't even care to mention it breaking. After the first time, which was a big deal at the time, they should have put safeguards in place so that they could notice it happening. If the fault is with ABBYY, then I'm okay with Apple breaking it for the sake of internally improving Preview, and blame for the breakage lies with ABBYY. But I expect Apple to tell me – because it happened before. That blame lies with Apple.

That is my reasoning, and I don't think that's too high a bar for one of the richest companies on the planet, priding themselves in the details and "it just works". You don't have to agree with that, obviously. Calling me an ass for that is extremely rude and uncalled for, though. I was under the impression that this tone was actually not acceptable here.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#239

Post by crazygringo »

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?

I've gone back and forth between Apple Books and Acrobat Reader a lot.

Ultimately I currently use Books because I do a lot of multicolored highlighting which is far more consistent in Books, and because Books lets you set bookmarks (to go back and forth between main text and endnotes) which Acrobat inexplicably still does not support.

Ultimately every PDF app is good at some things and terrible at others, and you're just going to have to find the app that has the best set of features for you. It is pretty sad that all the apps have significant drawbacks for certain common workflows.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#240

Post by crazygringo »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #197
Jtsummers wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like the Apple Books app because - It syncs across all my devices. No 3rd party storage like Dropbox required. In fact what I don't like is GoodReader asks for too broad an access to Dropbox/OneDrive if you try to set it up. - Books is first party app so absolutely no tracking whatsoever. GoodReader had Facebook SDK and Google Analytics and was trying to contact a bunch of other trackers the last time I installed i…

Oh man, that was another nightmare with Books. I tried keeping syncing on for a year, but ultimately switched back to a local library.

It worked 99% of the time. But then every few weeks it would overwrite my newer-annotated version of a PDF with an older one, and I'd lose chapters' worth (in one case an entire books' worth) of highlights. It was infuriating.

It had to be some kind of iDrive sync bug. It seems insane that type of stuff passes QA, I can't even imagine.

Post reply on HN