Anybody knows why this page looks different in Acrobat and in DT?
Same page, same file; first DT, second Acrobat
What does it look like in preview?
1 Like
upper image
Then that’s the answer: Apple’s PDFKit is what drives the display in Preview and DT. If it doesn’t display a PDF correctly, there’s probably nothing DT can do about it.
no way to export from Acrobat a better file?
I don’t know, I don’t use Acrobat. But if you’re really talking about Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader, that is): AFAIK that can create PDFs.
It is not so much the file, but the software algorithms to display the file. Acrobat and Apple’s technology different.
this way how to import PDFs into DT?
That sentence doesn’t parse. Perhaps you could try to elaborate?
I meant… if the reason is “…the software algorithms to display the file. Acrobat and Apple’s technology different.”, that means that every Acrobat file can produce the same result when imported in DT?
What do you mean by “Acrobat file”?
Did the PDF already come with a text layer, or did you perform OCR with Acrobat? I imagine using DEVONthink’s OCR would fix it. Though I don’t know how the two OCR engines compare for the actual text layer.
No. The PDF is probably ok, in the sense of “adhering to the specification”. But PDFKit (Apple’s framework) is known to have quirks.
You could try to print the file to PDF from Acrobat and see what that gives.
1 Like
dinner, thanks
tommorow 
You need to think far more broadly about PDFs. There is no singular type of PDF, nor is there a single PDF engine. There are countless variations on PDFs created over many, many years. Some of them are conforming and fine; others not so much. So you can’t reasonably anticipate one PDF to behave like another PDF in all cases. Do they often work well? Sure. Always? No.
Also, Adobe, who invented and developed the standard, does things other PDF frameworks can’t do. So it’s not a good measure of what other apps should be able to do. @chrillek is correct in checking DEVONthink’s display against Previews as we also use Apple’s PDFKit (though not 100% the same version Apple keeps for themselves).
Just some things to consider.
1 Like
so even if I export from Acrobat a PDF it is possible it get “confused” in Preview?
Sure, it’s possible. But again, guaranteed or likely? It depends on the PDF itself. But why would you be exporting from Acrobat? Are you just referring to this particular PDF?
I would like to import that PDF file into DT to manage in the usual way…clipping, linking, etc…
Well, as I was getting at, there’s no way we can guarantee any specific PDF will behave. Is this PDF available from a public source?
Internet Archive
Well, that information will certainly make it easy to find and to reproduce the problem 