7 ms·

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

by zepto 6y ago

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 care if it only worked because they had workarounds for super shitty PDFs that ABBYY possibly produces, I just need my OS to keep working for me.”

AlexandrB 6y ago
Would be interesting to see if Preview is stripping OCRd text from PDFs not created by ABBYY FineReader.
matrixagent 6y ago
Read it again. This bug could hit you without ever using ABBYY yourself. Apple broke Preview.
- r00fus 6y ago
  So is there an active Preview corruption example that doesn't involve ABBYY? I've used FineReader before for a commercial effort, I do remember it being very finicky.
  - apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
    It's unrelated to OCR, but there have been other Preview issues. We ran into an issue a few years ago where saving a PDF with forms in Preview would set some style setting so that in most other readers, the form fields would have no background color and use white text, making them unreadable. They were still perfectly readable in Preview, but had the style issues in Chrome, Firefox, Acrobat (and Reader), and Foxit. We have a project where we programatically fill in PDF forms using PDFtk and one day, our editor just starting spitting out empty PDFs. After troubleshooting, we traced it back to the style changes Preview was making after another dev had accidentally done a CMD+S on the template file and committed the template. In short: NEVER save a PDF with Preview. You should probably just avoid opening it in Preview period, frankly.
  - matrixagent 6y ago
    I personally don't use anything else, but when the problem first occured a few years ago, it was not limited to PDFs from ABBYY. (Which is not to say that it's purely Preview.app's fault. Maybe all of these PDFs were created in a bad way, would not surprise me at all. Could very well be that Preview.app is actually "improving" and fixing old bugs/cruft, breaking things that worked before but never should have in the first place. As the end user that doesn't really matter for me though, as I said in the post itself.)
    - zepto 6y ago
      > Could very well be that Preview.app is actually "improving" and fixing old bugs/cruft, breaking things that worked before but never should have in the first place. Exactly this. So the question is, whose responsibility is it? Apple’s to magically support the intersection of all the broken sofware? You essentially have argued that ABBY is popular enough that Apple should have tested it. Maybe it is popular, but the implication is that Apple would need to regression test against all this popular PDF generating software for any change to the preview engine, since they wouldn’t be able to know for sure what software’s PDFs would be broken by conforming changes. What we know they did, was to make a copy of Big Sur available for ABBY to use to test their own software. That’s pretty standard practice in a case like this and is them behaving responsibly. If Preview really was at fault, ABBY could have raised the issue with Apple, and or put a warning in their own software. If it’s that popular, you’d think they would have an incentive to do this. What isn’t obvious is that Apple should somehow introduce workarounds every time a third party doesn’t fix a bug.
- zepto 6y ago
  I read it. It doesn’t show that Apple broke Preview. It says Preview stopped being compatible with PDF’s produced by ABBYY. Those PDFs could have been buggy all along, and only now be showing up due to improvements in preview. It’s possible that Apple broke preview, but having seen how poorly maintained ABBYY is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was producing malformed PDFs that just happened to work on older version of preview.
  - matrixagent 6y ago
    I honestly don't care who is exactly at fault. I definitely blame Apple for destroying the PDF. There might be plenty of blame left for ABBYY for creating a bad PDF in the first place. That does not change how utterly unacceptable Preview.app's behavior here is. If you honestly think there is no valid criticism for Apple here, I don't know what to tell you. In any case, the whole thing is annoying technology – and seeing some of the comments here, people should more often try to step out of their own mind bubble and try to look at these things form their grandparents' or similar perspective. I personally am very aware of plenty of ways to work around this issue. But Apple used to be the company you could use if you either are not or don't want to be concerned about things like that. And a quick edit: I really dislike people who discuss like you do – all of what I just wrote is already stated in the post itself. Another commenter even called you out for ignoring that part when quoting me. I should not have wasted five minutes spelling it out for you again, your mind won't be changed anyway.
    - zepto 6y ago
      With all due respect, if you had led with your “footnote”, you wouldn’t have even been able to write such an angry sounding piece. Also, you say that you don’t care who is at fault, but that isn’t how the piece came off. It’s odd you’d say that now. I quoted you because you hadn’t incorporated this key information into the main text. What I think is that there are many ill-formed PDFs out there and that supporting the intersection of all of them is essentially impossible. I also think that it’s every bit the responsibility of a company like ABBY to generate good PDFs. How can it not be? Relying on Preview to be forgiving when you are a maker of PDF generation software is obviously irresponsible. Why do you think ABBY didn’t announce that this problem existed when the Big Sur betas were available for them to test with? For what it’s worth, I stopped recommending Fujitsu scanners years ago. For a while I loved mine, but none of the software was well maintained.
- ehutch79 6y ago
  but the file was stuff generated with abbyy, even if you give it to someone else.
- masswerk 6y ago
  "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 wiriting it back. Now, some algorithms and routines may be more robust and allowing than others. Maybe, an innocent refactoring attempt just lost that critical bit of robustness, required to deal with that particular format produced by this particular application. For example, consider an XML-based format, where a particular application delivered a malformed document, like a missing closing quote for some attribute. Most XML interpreters will churn happily along with this, but, after a rewrite of some routine, an application just ignores the malformed tag with the runaway string. Did it break XML? Or did it just fail to interpret a malformed document, it had somehow been able to deal with thanks to some extra robustness present in the previous version? Considering this hypothetical case: Should that application be improved by an update to regain its previous robustness? Yes, absolutely. Is it a bug and is the vendor to blame? Probably not. Mind that this might be quite well what is happening here, as well.
  - matrixagent 6y ago
    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.
    - zepto 6y ago
      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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
arvindamirtaa 6y ago
Here's the rest of the statement that you left out that answers your point. "...I just need my OS to keep working for me. This bug could hit me without even owning a scanner at all – someone sending me a PDF that I then unknowingly break before archiving it. That’s the part I’m mad about."
- zepto 6y ago
  It doesn’t really. Firstly, that’s not what they are mad about, since that hasn’t actually happened to them. They are mad that the pdf’s their scanner produces don’t work properly. And secondly, that hypothetical could well be using broken software too. We really don’t know how bad the PDF’s ABBY produces are, but as someone who owned this scanner and the software, it’s fairly obvious that the software is barely maintained. 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.
  - arvindamirtaa 6y ago
    > "They are using software unsupported by the vendor and blaming Apple for the outcome." But by this logic, no software other than those that Apple sells you directly (their own or through the MAS) is "supported software". If Apple makes a change and all of them break rendering it useless of anyone using software not bought from them, would you still be making this same apology?
    - zepto 6y ago
      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.
      - arvindamirtaa 6y ago
        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?
jcrawfordor 6y ago
So Preview opens a file, which is apparently valid per Preview (Preview handles and displays it correctly). After changes, preview then saves a file that is not valid per Preview (OCR text layer is corrupted). It is very difficult for me construe a situation in which this would not be considered errata in Preview. Even if ABBYY is writing unusual PDFs, it's popular enough software that this issue will be encountered in the real world multiple times. Having to deal with unusually formed PDFs is just a general trait of writing PDF software. If you consider it a non-issue that your software writes corrupt PDFs when the same situation is handled correctly by Acrobat, no matter how unjust you feel the cruel world to be, you should not be in the PDF business. There's a reason most PDF viewers only present a highly constrained feature set, and it's because writing a capable PDF editor is very difficult. Apple has decided they are up to the challenge, and in this case has failed. As a general rule, if your software package opens a file fine, then writes a broken version of it, seems to all the world like a bug in your software package. The idea that this behavior in a PDF reader can be excused because the software that generated the PDF was not approved for the operating system the viewer is running on per the vendor... kind of stretches credulity. I don't usually inquire as the OS used to generate the PDF when I receive one.
- zepto 6y ago
  “The idea that this behavior in a PDF reader can be excused because the software that generated the PDF was not approved for the operating system the viewer is running on per the vendor.” Nobody is saying that. The suggestion is that the software that generates the PDF produces corrupt documents. The fact that the vendor of that software doesn’t approve it for Big Sur suggests that they might be aware that there are problems.
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    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 user, this looks 100% like a problem in Preview no matter what's happening, and it's Apple's responsibility to not do this kind of thing to users. The PDF opens properly the first time, so de facto it is "valid" as determined by the product that later corrupts it. As I said, handling questionably valid PDFs is part and parcel of writing PDF software, and failure to handle a PDF that otherwise renders correctly looks like a bug on your part... especially when it otherwise renders correctly in your own software.
db48x 6y ago
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.
- zepto 6y ago
  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.
  - db48x 6y ago
    It's entirely obvious that the bug is in Preview.

by zepto 6y ago

AlexandrB 6y ago

Would be interesting to see if Preview is stripping OCRd text from PDFs not created by ABBYY FineReader.

matrixagent 6y ago

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

r00fus 6y ago
So is there an active Preview corruption example that doesn't involve ABBYY? I've used FineReader before for a commercial effort, I do remember it being very finicky.
- apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
  It's unrelated to OCR, but there have been other Preview issues. We ran into an issue a few years ago where saving a PDF with forms in Preview would set some style setting so that in most other readers, the form fields would have no background color and use white text, making them unreadable. They were still perfectly readable in Preview, but had the style issues in Chrome, Firefox, Acrobat (and Reader), and Foxit. We have a project where we programatically fill in PDF forms using PDFtk and one day, our editor just starting spitting out empty PDFs. After troubleshooting, we traced it back to the style changes Preview was making after another dev had accidentally done a CMD+S on the template file and committed the template. In short: NEVER save a PDF with Preview. You should probably just avoid opening it in Preview period, frankly.
- matrixagent 6y ago
  I personally don't use anything else, but when the problem first occured a few years ago, it was not limited to PDFs from ABBYY. (Which is not to say that it's purely Preview.app's fault. Maybe all of these PDFs were created in a bad way, would not surprise me at all. Could very well be that Preview.app is actually "improving" and fixing old bugs/cruft, breaking things that worked before but never should have in the first place. As the end user that doesn't really matter for me though, as I said in the post itself.)
  - zepto 6y ago
    > Could very well be that Preview.app is actually "improving" and fixing old bugs/cruft, breaking things that worked before but never should have in the first place. Exactly this. So the question is, whose responsibility is it? Apple’s to magically support the intersection of all the broken sofware? You essentially have argued that ABBY is popular enough that Apple should have tested it. Maybe it is popular, but the implication is that Apple would need to regression test against all this popular PDF generating software for any change to the preview engine, since they wouldn’t be able to know for sure what software’s PDFs would be broken by conforming changes. What we know they did, was to make a copy of Big Sur available for ABBY to use to test their own software. That’s pretty standard practice in a case like this and is them behaving responsibly. If Preview really was at fault, ABBY could have raised the issue with Apple, and or put a warning in their own software. If it’s that popular, you’d think they would have an incentive to do this. What isn’t obvious is that Apple should somehow introduce workarounds every time a third party doesn’t fix a bug.
zepto 6y ago
I read it. It doesn’t show that Apple broke Preview. It says Preview stopped being compatible with PDF’s produced by ABBYY. Those PDFs could have been buggy all along, and only now be showing up due to improvements in preview. It’s possible that Apple broke preview, but having seen how poorly maintained ABBYY is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was producing malformed PDFs that just happened to work on older version of preview.
- matrixagent 6y ago
  I honestly don't care who is exactly at fault. I definitely blame Apple for destroying the PDF. There might be plenty of blame left for ABBYY for creating a bad PDF in the first place. That does not change how utterly unacceptable Preview.app's behavior here is. If you honestly think there is no valid criticism for Apple here, I don't know what to tell you. In any case, the whole thing is annoying technology – and seeing some of the comments here, people should more often try to step out of their own mind bubble and try to look at these things form their grandparents' or similar perspective. I personally am very aware of plenty of ways to work around this issue. But Apple used to be the company you could use if you either are not or don't want to be concerned about things like that. And a quick edit: I really dislike people who discuss like you do – all of what I just wrote is already stated in the post itself. Another commenter even called you out for ignoring that part when quoting me. I should not have wasted five minutes spelling it out for you again, your mind won't be changed anyway.
  - zepto 6y ago
    With all due respect, if you had led with your “footnote”, you wouldn’t have even been able to write such an angry sounding piece. Also, you say that you don’t care who is at fault, but that isn’t how the piece came off. It’s odd you’d say that now. I quoted you because you hadn’t incorporated this key information into the main text. What I think is that there are many ill-formed PDFs out there and that supporting the intersection of all of them is essentially impossible. I also think that it’s every bit the responsibility of a company like ABBY to generate good PDFs. How can it not be? Relying on Preview to be forgiving when you are a maker of PDF generation software is obviously irresponsible. Why do you think ABBY didn’t announce that this problem existed when the Big Sur betas were available for them to test with? For what it’s worth, I stopped recommending Fujitsu scanners years ago. For a while I loved mine, but none of the software was well maintained.
ehutch79 6y ago
but the file was stuff generated with abbyy, even if you give it to someone else.
masswerk 6y ago
"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 wiriting it back. Now, some algorithms and routines may be more robust and allowing than others. Maybe, an innocent refactoring attempt just lost that critical bit of robustness, required to deal with that particular format produced by this particular application. For example, consider an XML-based format, where a particular application delivered a malformed document, like a missing closing quote for some attribute. Most XML interpreters will churn happily along with this, but, after a rewrite of some routine, an application just ignores the malformed tag with the runaway string. Did it break XML? Or did it just fail to interpret a malformed document, it had somehow been able to deal with thanks to some extra robustness present in the previous version? Considering this hypothetical case: Should that application be improved by an update to regain its previous robustness? Yes, absolutely. Is it a bug and is the vendor to blame? Probably not. Mind that this might be quite well what is happening here, as well.
- matrixagent 6y ago
  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.
  - zepto 6y ago
    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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

arvindamirtaa 6y ago

Here's the rest of the statement that you left out that answers your point. "...I just need my OS to keep working for me. This bug could hit me without even owning a scanner at all – someone sending me a PDF that I then unknowingly break before archiving it. That’s the part I’m mad about."

zepto 6y ago
It doesn’t really. Firstly, that’s not what they are mad about, since that hasn’t actually happened to them. They are mad that the pdf’s their scanner produces don’t work properly. And secondly, that hypothetical could well be using broken software too. We really don’t know how bad the PDF’s ABBY produces are, but as someone who owned this scanner and the software, it’s fairly obvious that the software is barely maintained. 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.
- arvindamirtaa 6y ago
  > "They are using software unsupported by the vendor and blaming Apple for the outcome." But by this logic, no software other than those that Apple sells you directly (their own or through the MAS) is "supported software". If Apple makes a change and all of them break rendering it useless of anyone using software not bought from them, would you still be making this same apology?
  - zepto 6y ago
    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.
    - arvindamirtaa 6y ago
      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?

jcrawfordor 6y ago

So Preview opens a file, which is apparently valid per Preview (Preview handles and displays it correctly). After changes, preview then saves a file that is not valid per Preview (OCR text layer is corrupted). It is very difficult for me construe a situation in which this would not be considered errata in Preview. Even if ABBYY is writing unusual PDFs, it's popular enough software that this issue will be encountered in the real world multiple times. Having to deal with unusually formed PDFs is just a general trait of writing PDF software. If you consider it a non-issue that your software writes corrupt PDFs when the same situation is handled correctly by Acrobat, no matter how unjust you feel the cruel world to be, you should not be in the PDF business. There's a reason most PDF viewers only present a highly constrained feature set, and it's because writing a capable PDF editor is very difficult. Apple has decided they are up to the challenge, and in this case has failed. As a general rule, if your software package opens a file fine, then writes a broken version of it, seems to all the world like a bug in your software package. The idea that this behavior in a PDF reader can be excused because the software that generated the PDF was not approved for the operating system the viewer is running on per the vendor... kind of stretches credulity. I don't usually inquire as the OS used to generate the PDF when I receive one.

zepto 6y ago
“The idea that this behavior in a PDF reader can be excused because the software that generated the PDF was not approved for the operating system the viewer is running on per the vendor.” Nobody is saying that. The suggestion is that the software that generates the PDF produces corrupt documents. The fact that the vendor of that software doesn’t approve it for Big Sur suggests that they might be aware that there are problems.
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  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 user, this looks 100% like a problem in Preview no matter what's happening, and it's Apple's responsibility to not do this kind of thing to users. The PDF opens properly the first time, so de facto it is "valid" as determined by the product that later corrupts it. As I said, handling questionably valid PDFs is part and parcel of writing PDF software, and failure to handle a PDF that otherwise renders correctly looks like a bug on your part... especially when it otherwise renders correctly in your own software.

db48x 6y ago

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.

zepto 6y ago
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.
- db48x 6y ago
  It's entirely obvious that the bug is in Preview.