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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

#281

Post by smartbit »

crazygringo wrote: post #240
drevil-v2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That hurts, sorry to hear. iCloud drive supports files sync for files 50GB or less in size. Have you experienced sync issues with iCloud drive too? Or with Dropbox?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#282

Post by marcan_42 »

idle_zealot wrote: post #245
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…

> 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 You've just described the .cbt format! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book_archive

And it's a bad format, because .tar does not have an index that allows random access. It also does not have compression, unless you stick it in gzip, which makes it even worse because then you can't even skip entries, you have to decompress the whole thing from the top.

.zip is better, at least that has an index, but at the end of the file, so it's not linearly streamable.

For what it's worth, .pdf is structurally ~the same as .zip; the index is at the end, and blocks are compressed individually.

Choice of archive format matters :-)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#283

Post by interestica »

dkonofalski wrote: post #162
jcrawfordor wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worded it that way for two reasons, one of which is admittedly speculative: 1) It seems highly unlikely that ABBYY relies on some changed OS behavior in generating PDFs that leads to it producing PDFs that are malformed in such a way that is only revealed when they are rewritten by Preview. Behavior in Preview is by far a more likely cause of the problem. Generally the thing that changed is what broke... 2) To the…

>The PDF opens properly the first time, so de facto it is "valid" as determined by the product that later corrupts it. While I agree with your main point that, to the user, this looks like a problem with Preview, I think it's actually because Preview is doing something beneficial to open the file which is to ignore "bogus" data. Preview, from what I can tell, ignores additional data that it doesn't expect specificall…

I think a big issue is that 'preview' is used as just a pre-view. The metaphor is that you haven't actually opened/viewed the file yet 'for real'. Yet, preview has morphed into a program that makes changes to files even without any kind of save dialogue.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#284

Post by soraminazuki »

m463 wrote: post #244
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…

What annoys me is that there are some .pdf manuals I want to refer to, and when I view them in preview and go to quit it asks if I want to keep my changes or revert them. WTF? why does viewing a manual - and I only used navigation like page up / page down - cause modifications?

You've likely created a text box by double clicking on the document.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#285

Post by drevil-v2 »

smartbit wrote: post #278
drevil-v2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I run pi-hole with recursive dns so I was able to see what domains any app contacts and then I am able to lock it down on my local network no problem.

On my devices (iPhone / iPad) I also use Lockdown app which allows you to blacklist IP addresses and domain so once I can see what an app is up to using pi-hole, I manually add those domains to Lockdown so that even when I am out of the house the trackers are blocked.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#286

Post by systemvoltage »

cratermoon wrote: post #263
systemvoltage wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Not being able to scale the fonts for different resolutions is something only a young person with 20/20 vision would thinks is a feature.

You can zoom the whole thing.

Scaling fonts while keeping the width of the line the same causes other problems.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#287

Post by systemvoltage »

fomine3 wrote: post #250
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…

Oppositely what I absolutely WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. I wish both option is available.

Markdown/Asciidocs/reStructured Text :)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#288

Post by iansinnott »

p1necone wrote: post #247
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…

The more I learn about macs the more I think the "it just works" crowd really mean "I will sacrifice my system "working" sometimes in exchange for having zero configuration options".

In the past it really did just work and macs were configurable. The trend of limited configuration is more recent (and yes, it's terrible).

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#289

Post by fomine3 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #287
fomine3 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oppositely what I absolutely WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. I wish both option is available.

Markdown/Asciidocs/reStructured Text :)

Yes, honestly HTML or its subset is enough for me but some author/publisher publishes only ePub or PDF.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#290

Post by ghufran_syed »

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 use notability on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. You can import the pdf, then annotate
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