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

311–320 of 326 posts

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#311

Post by OkGoDoIt »

tekacs wrote: post #234
cle wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which on Windows is the key combination to delete the most recently typed word, and is basically muscle memory to replace spelling mistakes for me...

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#312

Post by gpm »

ketamine__ wrote: post #308
gpm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It renders PDFs, let's you scale/move where on the screen the page is rendered, let's you flip through pages, let's you switch to a view of page thumbnails, let's you go to a page number, remembers the last page you were on.

If you expect more from your ebook reader than that, it is not just because of software.

As a sibling comment mentions that might be fixed soon. V1 had long since had support for third party apps. V2 is taking a bit of time (because controlling eink screens in weird) but will probably have third party apps support soon. At that point you will be able to use one of the well known open source ebook reading apps.

Edit: And to be clear, all the third party app support is unofficial, the help menu on the tablet includes the ssh password for root, everything past that is just reverse engineering (it's a pretty typical linux system apart from the display).

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#313

Post by dkonofalski »

interestica wrote: post #283
dkonofalski wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Are you confusing Quick Look with Preview? Preview is not just for PDFs and allows you to view, annotate, and edit lots of document types...

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#314

Post by zepto »

matrixagent wrote: post #304
masswerk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Are you happy to accept corrupt PDFs being generated by ABBYY, a company that does nothing but write software to produce PDFs and yet hasn’t even commented, let alone maintained their software?

Do you think ABBYY is even aware if the issue?

It seems like you expect Apple to test everyone else’s software, and make workarounds for their bugs.

Regardless of Apple’s scale and resources, this is obivously unreasonable.

Also you say: “That's all there is to it for me as an end user” as if you didn’t understand anything about the complexities of software development, but reading your comments on other topics, you are obviously skilled in the art. You are not ‘just an end user’ who doesn’t understand the complexities.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#315

Post by e_proxus »

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 been a very happy user of LiquidText [1]. You can load multiple PDFs/images/documents into a LiquidText project and annotate and cross reference. There’s a separate work space outside of the documents where you can store clippings and collect summaries.

It’s great for reading long standard documents and cross reference between them and supporting material like examples etc.

[1]: https://www.liquidtext.net/

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#316

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 »

refulgentis wrote: post #37
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.

In my very humble opinion, it's accurate: "Saving a PDF with Preview in Big Sur [Preview in Big Sur] can corrupt OCR text added by a third-party program [is irreversibly destroying PDFs]" I understand the (fairly common, in these comments) viewpoint that this is the fault of the "third-party program", but since the PDF is readable up until Preview touches it...I find it hard to come around to the viewpoint the third-…

> Not sure how much longer I can keep trying

Keep trying, just with a new account every few months are so. HN has no privacy controls, we must add our own.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#317

Post by dkonofalski »

virgilp wrote: post #298
dkonofalski wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you probably don't use Acrobat enough. PDF is a finicky mistress.

Maybe; but I do have the full suite. Have used it plenty during the pandemic to fill in forms digitally (some that were designed to be filled in digitally, others that were not), both on an iPad and on computers. Sure, I'm not a hardcore professional user but those wouldn't be using Preview anyway; I'd bet my family usage is consistently above average. (also used it before the pandemic - I used to work for Adobe, for…

I don't think I'm letting Apple off easy because I don't think it's not their fault. I just think that, until we see the document in question, we can't squarely say that it is their fault. Preview and Acrobat both have ways of dealing with junk/bogus data and I feel like that's what's going on here. There must have been some kind of bit switched when the document was "corrected" and it's possible that Acrobat and Preview just resolve that issue differently while both still outputting "valid" PDF files.

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#318

Post by Yetanfou »

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…

Install 'Linux' [1] on the machine then? That is, assuming you're using a model which is supported by some form of Linux. That way you get to use the hardware without being bitten by the software. Linux distributions are not perfect either but they offer fewer such 'surprises'. Keep MacOS around for those times you need to run software which is only supported there but do your main work in Linux.

[1] where 'Linux' stands for any supported Linux distribution

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#319

Post by saagarjha »

zepto wrote: post #56
function_seven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really isn’t Apple’s fault if someone else is producing bad files that they happened to previously tolerate, especially if that somebody isn’t maintaining their software. I think it is. Preview used to correctly handle the thing, and now it doesn't. Users cannot be expected to inspect the raw PS code of their PDFs to determine standards compliance. What they can do is assume that something that works yesterday,…

Yes, it is in principle possible that Apple was doing something special to support bad PDFs produced by ABBY which they then removed. If this is what happened, I would agree with you. But, there is no evidence yet that they removed anything. It’s quite possible (I’d say likely) that ABBY’s PDFs were corrupt all along. Preview may have tolerated them not because of a special feature which was then removed, but because…

I’m sure Apple had much more time with ABBY than ABBY had with Big Sur ;)

Re: Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

#320

Post by Yetanfou »

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…

Strangely enough (?) I have not had many problems with PDF, certainly no more than with other document formats. I often use tools like pdftk [0] (as found on many Linux distributions) to split sections out of PDFs, create new ones out of single-page PDFs created with ImageMagick, create odd-even page versions etc. I generally do not touch the more "advanced features" like embedded JS (which I have disabled in all readers which support it), I just use it as a document format which more or less guarantees the resulting document looks the way it was meant to, plus or minus a few fonts. For that purpose it works works well enough.

The "bunch of jpgs/pngs/pick your poison in a tar container" format you describe exists in a fashion: Comic Book Archive, a format meant for and mostly used for comics. It consists of a compressed archive which contains sequentially numbered "pages" which can be JPEG, PNG or other image file formats. For pure image documents it can be used as a replacement for PDF but since it does not support text it can not be used for scanned OCR'ed documents. DjVu [2] does support a text layer but that comes at the cost of complexity, it is far from the simple container you propose. Since an OCR'ed text layer needs to save not only the text itself but also the location on the image for each character I don't see any way to avoid complexity here.

[0] https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book_archive

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu

Post reply on HN