Certain PDFs open in DEVONthink cannot be highlighted as these menu items are not clickable. Also, OCR PDF in DEVONthink didn’t work for me, but OCR PDF in Acrobat worked for me. Hope it would be helpful to diagnose the issue.
FYI, highlighting in Apple Preview does not work here, whereas it works with PDFPen. Different underlying PDF technologies in use. My hunch is DEVONthink uses same PDF technology as Apple uses in Preview. (might be mistaken).
So being pragmatic … recommend you use PDFPen or Adobe Acrobat to move on with your work now.
…and works as expected. However, editing (e.g. highlighting) breaks the text layer due to PDFkit issues, therefore this workaround isn’t useful in this case.
After turning on the option ForceEditablePDFs, I encountered the same issue discussed below: OCR layer disappeared.
I guess the cause is the annotation within DEVONthink as previously they worked well when annotating with PDF Expert. Even though this is a bug of Apple PDFkit, please come up with a workaround.
Now my whole database with thousands of PDFs are at risk, which is really annoying
Is the text layer DELETED from the PDF, thus putting your PDFs at risk, or using an app that does not use Apple’s PDFKit, e.g. PDF Pen, PDF Expert, or Adobe Acrobat also does not work?
That’s why this hidden preference is disabled by default, there’s a reason why DEVONthink marks certain PDF documents automatically as read-only. The internals of the PDFkit on the other hand have to be fixed by Apple unfortunately.
PDFs created by macOS (e.g. via PDF services or exported by other apps using the Quartz engine) or not containing any Asian characters shouldn’t cause any troubles usually.
Unfortunately, many PDFs that I was working recently in my database are OCR PDFs, and a majority of them are Chinese books But anyway, thanks for your reply and hard work. Hope this issue can be fixed ASAP.
After a PDF was added in my database, the log file showed “Tranferring attributes skipped to avoid corrupting text layer”. What does it mean, is it related to the issue here?