macOS 10.12.2 Users Urged to Avoid Using 'Work-in-Progress' Preview App to Edit PDFs

This confirms my decision to stay on El Capitan for the foreseeable future. Not too long ago I absolutely depended on PDF editing abilities for my job. I'm sure I can't be the only one. For scientific researchers on mac this is huge deal.

 

As a previous 10 year Mac user I'm more and more happy every day that I recently ditched Mac and switched to Windows 10. Not everything is perfect (of course), but many things are really awesome and I definitely don't get the constant feeling of being on a dying, neglected platform.

My shiny new iPhone 7+ is probably my last Apple product. Because Mac was THE central Apple product for me. Without it I have no reason to sick with the pathetic, greedy and lazy Apple anymore. I might stick with iPhone, but because I'm definitely dumping all Apple apps/services - I'll stick around ONLY if iOS 11 allows to choose default apps from other superior companies. If not - good bye. Yes, I know, I won't let the door hit me.

 

Seems like par for the course these days for Apple. They don't give a darn about PDFs, but they sure did put a lot of focus on redesigning that Peach emoji!

 

Still waiting for apple to fix archive utility for 64 bit compressions aka any archive past 65535 files/4 gig, because no other program can unzip except apple...unforgivable.

 

Maybe it's a good thing I can't upgrade to Sierra after all.

 

QA, QA, QA...

 

Yes, it is the second time (at least that I know of), that Apple tries to rewrite a "legacy" library and fails miserably. It seems they don't have any developers that actually understand the OS and can write stuff from scratch.

 

This is a secret picture of the entire Apple staff, in action, dedicated to work on new macOS innovations, macOS applications and mac pros.

 

True story. Many of the most important features of Pages 4.x , of which this is only one, never reappeared.

 

That's nice, but doesn't address the issue here. Preview used to be perfectly safe to use to edit a PDF document, without worrying that it would lose OCR information added by another application.

Apple's decision to change around good, working code to handle PDFs in OS X is clearly one they made without giving developers any warning, and without any of the quality control testing that should have accompanied it.

I've been relying on the Mariner Paperless software along with a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner for years to store all of my important paper documents electronically on my Mac's hard drive. With all of the changes Apple made in Sierra, they broke Paperless to the point where the application immediately crashed when closing out of a window viewing one of the saved documents. The developer had to wait on Apple to fix a bug in Sierra (probably part of this PDFKit fiasco) before he could release the next Paperless update that used the patched OS X code -- so I had to struggle along with the software crashing constantly until then.

That worked until the latest Sierra update, and now Paperless is back to crashing again. And worse yet? I realized it corrupted its internal database after all these crashes -- so some of my old documents I scanned in a few years back are cross-referenced with data for other ones! I don't even know if this is repairable? (Have to see if Mariner has some kind of database repair utility they can provide.)

 

PDF Expert for the win!

 

I have 2 mid 2011 27in iMacs, iPhone 5s, an iPad Mini, apple TV v3 etc that I am in need of upgrading, I've been waiting for the new iMac as the iMac actually anchors my user experience. I did consider the Macbook Pro but decided to wait until the new iMac is released before making my decision.

I've been watching the MacBook Pro conversations and trying to get a feel for what Apples future road map is. I'm not in need of the latest greatest phone so its the MacOS that concerns me and the hardware it is installed on. If we continue to see less attention in this area than what we have experienced in the past I may jump back to Microsoft in 2017

 

They gonna remove preview as a solution..........

 

Luckily they seem to know more about development than you do. You don't even know that developers are not the ones making the decision to include this in a production version. This is more in the realms of release managers, product managers and upper management. If you want to blame someone, pick the right one.

Not much of an issue with software like PDF Expert and PDFPen. Those are actually meant for editing PDFs, not just some previewing app that got all sorts of editing features bolted on.

 

I reported on issues with Preview when Sierra was in beta testing, and they have yet to be fixed. They don't seem to care much...

 

Heavy users of Preview noticed that Apple began to make major changes to the app after Snow Leopard, many of them not very good changes. They did not seem to be publicized at the time but they caused headaches for people like myself who use Preview to search very large PDFs. Performance took a huge hit, for one. Content indexed in Spotlight often can't be found in the document itself by searching for it in Preview. Something has been wrong here for a very long time.

The problem with the current version of Preview seems to be mainly with third-party apps, but apparently not only third-party apps used locally. I've noticed since updating to Sierra that text layers of download OCR'ed documents can be corrupted if I save them out of Preview to a new PDF (they turn to gibberish). If I simply move them to another directory without saving, the text layer is preserved intact. Whether this corruption occurs seem to depend on how the PDF was created in the first place. So Engst provides some solid advice here: don't edit PDFs in the Sierra version of Preview until Apple fixes the bugs.

 

iOS is a buggy mess too.

 

We will miss how great it was during the Leopard/Snow Leopard days.

 

Yes sl was really stable..at least last half of updates.

--- Post Merged, Jan 3, 2017 ---

I would think that as well.

--- Post Merged, Jan 3, 2017 ---

I really hope Apple doesn't continue staying with anti consumerism path this year.

 

Leopard was the last time the new OS features was super useful and well implemented, I remember the keynote they demoed the new features, after the keynote the biggest debate was the choise of desktop wallpaper (green grass), which incidently looked very alike with Microsoft wallpaper. Those were the days!

 

As a medical student who takes all of my lecture notes in Preview, it's not a minor issue. It's a rather major issue. I've adjusted how I take notes so I can still get by... but it was a major stressor for a few weeks (and school is already stressful enough!).

 

Really miss the down vote option.

 

Here's a form as viewed in Adobe Acrobat...

Here's the exact same form as viewed in Preview:


Notice anything wrong with it?

 

I really miss decency with people around here. Blaming the wrong person can actually be defamation.

 

I can see it all and it's not good.