Tuesday, October 3, 2017

PDFKit Improves Somewhat in High Sierra

Somewhat annoyingly, Apple has worked around many of these bugs in Preview rather than fixing them in the underlying PDFKit framework. That’s good for users, of course, because it means that Preview should work correctly. But it forces independent developers to implement their own workarounds, disable features, or put up with user complaints while hoping that Apple fixes the bugs.

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My take is that those who rely on PDF support in independent apps are probably better off upgrading to High Sierra than remaining on Sierra, since Apple has fixed some bugs. If you have instead stuck with 10.11 El Capitan, you may wish to delay upgrading to High Sierra until you can verify that the apps you rely on for PDF-related features are fully functional in High Sierra.

Previously: macOS 10.13 High Sierra Released, More macOS Preview PDF Trouble.

Update (2017-10-16): Luc P. Beaudoin:

Cognitive Productivity reader, Richard Holmes, notified me that macOS 10.13 (“High Sierra”) worsens the PDF rendering problems Apple introduced in macOS 10.12, Sierra, that I blogged about earlier. The problems are in Apple’s PDFKit used by third party developers. Apple seems to be using a private API to work around these problems in its Preview app and Safari. Fortunately, Richard has discovered some work-arounds, which I describe below.

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The PDF rendering problem seems to happen most frequently when multiple PDFs are open, and when some of those PDFs are big.

Bug Mac macOS 10.13 High Sierra PDF Preview.app