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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

Did they save the file using Preview? If so that’s on them, they chose to write a pdf using Preview and that comes with all of the pitfalls of pdf compatibility. Does plain old PostScript have this problem?

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I'm not the original author. The usecase I have for Preview is to open it up, read it, highlight a few things and save the file (with the new highlight overlays). I wouldn't expect that to destroy my underlying OCR (which I also use a 3rd party app for)

If the behavior changes, that's not on me, that's on Preview.

I don't have any issue with this today on my Mac, but I'm glad I didn't upgrade to BigSur. I almost did.

Yes, they used Preview to modify the PDF.

So misleading.

There are a chance that write goes wrong, but Preview is much more geared towards read than write.

This doesn't excuse Preview, but its name is suggestive enough.

Actually, I think it's not Preview bug. I use gramarly plugin in safari, and double copy-paste issue is happening there also. It's something more generally broken. I run 11.1

Probably most people who’ve done a bit of PDF work know there’s no guarantee of the same output from different (or even the same) editor. So I don’t think it’s Preview’s fault per since the problem is endemic to PDF. But I don’t think you can blame the user either. Really, PDFs are just these enormously useful complex things that are always breaking in unexpected ways and some people haven’t been bitten by its problems enough yet to cope properly.

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