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by zepto 2012 days 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.

1 comments

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.

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.