Read it again. This bug could hit you without ever using ABBYY yourself. Apple broke Preview.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In short: NEVER save a PDF with Preview. You should probably just avoid opening it in Preview period, frankly.
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.