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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

#271

Post by theamk »

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…

Sure, but the major text is still "write once" -- you can only add specially designated information to a read-only core.

As this article shows, a trivial operation on the core text, like "remove a blank page", is still very hard and pretty easy to get wrong.

I think having general Turing-complete power in a document format is a horrible idea. It's a pity we ended up with it. Something like OpenOffice's presentations ("odp") is also a single file which is layed out per page, and can be annotated, commented, approved, edited and so on, while not being Turing-complete.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#272

Post by smartbit »

cratermoon wrote: post #260
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…

What size and resolution is your eReader? I can read PDFs on my computers fine, the screen is large enough. On my eReader I can't both see a whole page and have the text large enough to read, even with my reading glasses. I end up zooming in to bring the text up to readable size and then I'm only seeing part of the page and have to scroll left/right/up/down to read a page.

Scrolling left/right zoomed text can be prevented with Goodreader and these 2 simple steps

- with the crop function in Goodreader remove as much as possible margin left & right. This might cut text in the header/footer eg the page number. Optionally crop odd & even pages differently.

- turn the iPad landscape and with 2 fingers pinch to zoom the text until the margins snap to the sides of the screen. Now with a single finger scroll down to read the text from top to bottom. Flip to the next page by swiping with a single finger to the left and Goodreader will conveiniently start at the top of the next page.

In my experience for most portrait pages this enlarges the text big enough. As a bonus you can use the iPad Smart Cover as a stand in either position. I use this trick since the original iPad1 as Goodreader has been there since day 1.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#273

Post by hedora »

sim_card_map wrote: post #259
wtallis wrote: post #186

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. 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…

We now have JavaScript in PDFs?..

Of course. Postscript was turing complete, which makes it problematic for document interchange and printing, so they restricted it and called the result “pdf”.

At some point people realized they couldn’t embed arbitrary scripts in pdf files, so they added JavaScript.

Now we have the best of both worlds. It makes perfect sense if you think about it(?)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#274

Post by mulmen »

meibo wrote: post #267
robertoandred wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have proof of iCloud deleting photos?

I assume these are a result of bad UX, at least in my personal experience. iPhones used to/will(haven't had the pleasure in a year now) bother you quite heavily if you're at your iCloud storage cap to either upgrade or clean it out. Not a stretch that some users might not think long enough about the consequences.

Yeah I think the deleted from iCloud thing is bad UX. I don't recall the details.

The ~/Music and ~/Photos directories are basically owned by Apple though. I don't trust their apps with my files, especially when the rules change between OS versions.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#275

Post by theamk »

izacus wrote: post #204
TwoBit wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, PDF re-writing is one of very clear non-goals when you read the spec. It's designed to be generated, always consistent and then later annotated and marked up. And that doesn't make it read-only. It just makes it not suitable for live text editing just like a PNG isn't suitable for collaborative image work.

Eh, "remove empty page" is not "live text editing". I have seen tools struggle with seemingly simple operations, like "take page 1,4 from A and pages 4,6 from B, scale to fit paper size and combine into one file". And those are not some exotic requirements, those are one of the most basic operations people want to do with multi-page documents.

Also, did you want to say JPEG isn't suitable for collaborative image work (because it's lossy?). As PNG is a pretty fine exchange format if two people, who prefer different graphical editors, want to work on the same document.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#276

Post by theamk »

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 not like PDF is the only one with text layer, or the only options are PDF, JPG or PNG.

DjVU can have text layers as well, and I think SVG too?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#277

Post by db48x »

zepto wrote: post #91
db48x wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that ABBYY Finereader is going to produce different PDF files once they support the new OS? Possibly they will, if only to work around this obvious bug in Preview.

I’m arguing that yes, they will produce different PDF files. It’s not obvious the bug is in preview. The bug could easily be in in ABBYY’s PDF generation code. To be fair, I’m not arguing that this is the case. I’m arguing that it just as easily could be as there being a bug in Preview, which is also possible.

It's entirely obvious that the bug is in Preview.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#278

Post by smartbit »

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…

> GoodReader had Facebook SDK and Google Analytics and was trying to contact a bunch of other trackers the last time I installed it.

Longtime fan of Goodreader here. Sorry to hear that Goodreader is trying to contact trackers. How did you find out? Any suggestions how to prevent Goodreader to contact those trackers, eg pi-hole?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#279

Post by krull10 »

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…

Seconded for macOS. I usually update when the next major release is about to be announced. By 11 months they usually finally have the bugs worked out. It isn’t always necessary for every yearly release, but once you’ve been burned a few times you learn it’s better to wait for several point releases...

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#280

Post by Technically »

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.

Sorry, what did Jobs have to do with Flash? He died long before flash did....
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