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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
In short: NEVER save a PDF with Preview. You should probably just avoid opening it in Preview period, frankly.