No this is not correct.

ABBY hasn’t updated their software for Big Sur, i.e. ABBY themselves say it hasn’t been updated yet and is not supported by them on Big Sur.

That’s what unsupported means. It has nothing to do with whether Apple supports it.

I receive that PDF file that looks like any other PDF file.

I open it with preview. It opens fine. I close it and open it again. It opens fine.

I open it a third time and make a small arrow pointing to something and save it (as I would with ANY OTHER PDF).

It breaks.

I'm not using ABBYY. I've never heard of it. It's not on my system. It's just a PDF file that I got sent.

Now what?

You are opening it wrong /s

You’re a victim of ABBYY’s poor PDF generation, that’s what.

Nothing excuses ABBYY if their PDFs are corrupt.

Wow, just wow.

The PDF works fine before saving in Preview. As in, Preview itself will render the file perfectly fine with OCR. By all accounts, the PDF is completely valid and uncorrupted at this point. Making a change to the file and saving it in Preview is what causes the corruption.

So how the hell could you possibly excuse Preview and call this a ABBYY issue when Preview is the one that causes the issue?

That's absurd to the highest level.

>The PDF works fine before saving in Preview.

I think the disagreement here is that there's no evidence of this. Preview's error handling could very well be interpreting bad data and allowing the file to be opened. The question becomes, then, should Preview continue to propagate that bad data on save or should it try to correct it with the possibility that it corrupts just that data. If the PDF was not in-spec prior to Preview touching it but it is in-spec after Preview saves it, is it a good thing that Preview "fixed" the PDF file and made it "proper" or is it bad because it technically lost/corrupted data?

In other words, what is the "right" thing for a software to do in this case? Keep bad data and leave the file as "bad" or fix the issue to make a valid PDF and, as a side effect, remove the "bad" data?

“By all accounts, the PDF is completely valid and uncorrupted at this point.”

Is it? I don’t see any accounts showing this to be a fact.

Hahaha this is just brilliant.

It’s not brilliant. It’s just correct if ABBYY is producing corrupt PDFs, which is a possible cause of this problem.

If "Corrupt" = works fine until you make an edit and save using Preview, yes. You're 100% correct.

Works fine until you make an edit really doesn’t mean anything at all. PDF is much more complex than just a static image.

Someone buys a bottle coke

They shake it up a lot

They hand me said bottle of coke

I open it, and get sprayed by fizz

THAT IS CLEARLY THE COCA-COLA COMPANIES FAULT!

To be clear, my point here is that just because something is handed off, does not mean it's existence is reset or something.