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

301–310 of 326 posts

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#301

Post by wil421 »

jabbany wrote: post #107
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.

Kind of agree the current title is a bit misleading. I've never used any editing features in Preview (I mean it's called "preview" so...) and reading the title I thought this meant it was mangling files even by opening them which would have been super scary. As for non-Acrobat software mangling PDFs after editing... Well that's much less surprising. I've even had Acrobat mangle stuff in PDFs after editing...

Preview has similar features to Microsoft’s snipping tool. Highlighting, draw basic shapes, draw free hand with a couple colors, and add some annotations. I like it better than Windows most of the time.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#302

Post by dewey »

lilyball wrote: post #294
dewey wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a list of blog posts about the same problem linked in the article including a radar from 2016 ( https://openradar.appspot.com/29786282 ) on Apple’s bug tracker. It’s not exactly an obscure bug that nobody knows how to reproduce.

A radar from 2016 is not useful, that describes an old bug. Just because the symptoms look like something we’ve seen before doesn’t mean it’s the same underlying issue.

There might be newer Radars too, I can only see that 2016 one because some kind soul set up a public interface to show a subset of submitted Radars. With Apple's opaque and in-transparent bug reporting process there's no way of knowing if someone already reported it. I've submitted numerous feedbacks already but I can't do that for everything or do the homework for a trillion dollar company.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#303

Post by Siira »

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…

We already have CBR/CBZ.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#304

Post by matrixagent »

masswerk wrote: post #253
matrixagent wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Broke" may be a bit harsh. What appears to be happening is that Preview somehow loses or corrupts the toUnicode map, which is apparently located in the metadata, when saving the PDF. Mind that every application will have to reassemble/reflow the metadata when saving a reflowed document (like after cropping and/or discarding pages). To do so, the application has to interpret and to reassemble the metadata before wiri…

I think you might interpret the word more harshly than I intend it to be. Something that worked before Big Sur is not working in Big Sur. It's broken. That's all there is to it for me as an end user. Of course there is a difference in reasons for things breaking, and I'm not denying that Apple might have "improved" Preview.app when you judge it by how well it adheres to a PDF spec. But it still "broke" a very common and normal workflow by doing so, and I would at least expect them to acknowledge that. If they decide breaking this is worth it, that's absolutely fine with me. But I don't think they are even aware of it, and that is not something I'm willing accept from a company with the reach and resources of Apple.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#305

Post by matrixagent »

non-nil wrote: post #291
matrixagent wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory that is probably true – in my actual scenario I can't run them through ABBYY again because of the limitations of the bundled version. It only accepts PDFs coming from the scanner software, so running these through ABBYY again would give me an error message. I'd have to buy the full version to be able to try out that workaround.

On a totally not entirely unrelated note, I have found ExifTool[0] to be quite useful for many tasks. Especially in combination with a bash alias or simple Automator action, to be used in the services menu, or as a droplet or folder action. [0] https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html

That's exactly what I'm planning to explore as a workaround to remove the blank pages until ABBYY and/or Apple sort this out. :)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#306

Post by netflixandkill »

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".

For a decade or so it pretty much did just work. Alas, nothing gold (or metallic shades of white in this case) can stay.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#307

Post by higerordermap »

systemvoltage wrote: post #36
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…

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…

> The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.

So that it's very very hard to read on mobile, or in a small width window.

> For example, I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi

exactly the opposite. I want to be able to properly reflow it in a narrow window side by side with another tab on laptop, often for technological books.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#308

Post by ketamine__ »

gpm wrote: post #50
ketamine__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What device do you use to read PDF's?

I've really been enjoying a remarkable tablet since I got it a few weeks ago. Great for taking notes, great for reading pdf's (and scribbling on them - which is surprisingly useful!), terrible for literally anything else.

Is it a good ebook reader if you're not a prolific note taker?

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#309

Post by dkonofalski »

kalleboo wrote: post #270
dkonofalski wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, macOS does not touch files in Pictures or Music, only files that you've explicitly imported into the Photos or Music/iTunes apps. And it definitely doesn't silently delete photos from iCloud, if that was common it would be a major bug that would make the news.

It's interesting to me how people can upvote comments that are pretty much made up nonsense but comments like yours and mine are downvoted because people just want to hate on Apple.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#310

Post by Wowfunhappy »

markandrewj wrote: post #122
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…

Generally the PDF copy of a book is designed to fit the format of the final printed book. The PDF is even often the deliverable sent to press. If you are using something like an e-reader, or a smartphone, the PDF layout often doesn't translate well. Typesetting is also normally also done for ePub/Mobi, but the layout is tailored to the format of the device that the document will be read on. Although there are times w…

> Generally the PDF copy of a book is designed to fit the format of the final printed book. The PDF is even often the deliverable sent to press.

I believe this is precisely what the GP finds appealing about PDFs. A PDF (usually) constitutes the original copy, reproduced faithfully.

It's like the difference between buying a widescreen VHS versus one that uses pan-and-scan to fit the movie to your TV's aspect ratio. Sure, the widescreen copy may not be ideal for your viewing environment, but it's the version the director intended for you to see.

And for both eBooks and movies, you can work around the problem by using more appropriate hardware.

Post reply on HN