DT3's PDF viewer

DEVONthink
1

Hi all,

I was wondering whether one can select which PDF viewer is used to view PDFs in the (pre)view/edit pane of DT3. Below is the context for my question. Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,
Enrico

Context

I have four Macs (two iMacs, one MBA, one MBP — different ages). One is running MacOS 12.5; I’ve updated the other three to MacOS 12.6. After the update, the Preview app no longer shows images in some PDFs. The images are still visible if I open the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The PDFs in question are articles downloaded from journal websites. The images are not visible when I view those PDFs on the journal websites in Safari, but I can see those images when I use Firefox and select Adobe Acrobat Reader as Firefox’s PDF viewer.

Images in those PDFs are also not visible in the the (pre)view/edit pane of DT3 and when I open those PDFs in DT3 (DEVONthink Pro 3.8.6). To work around that, I now select those PDFs, right-click, and choose to open them with Adobe Acrobat Reader. But this workaround forces me to open those PDFs every time I want to look at their images instead of leveraging DT3’s (pre)view/edit pane. Plus, I really liked to annotate my PDFs with DT3 instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader…

The images in those PDFs are also not visible in DTTG3 (3.5.6).

I’ve contacted Apple Support about it, but they were unable to diagnose and fix the issue. They told me that Apple may simply have stopped supporting certain features in older PDFs. This may or may not be reverted in future updates. For me, this is an additional problem because one of my Macs — and some of the Macs in my lab — are too old to be updated to MacOS Ventura, so I’m trying to understand what my options are.

Thank you for your consideration.

2

Well, since some macOS versions, PDF support is mostly broken. Not-supported options aren’t old but new, like some modern Abbyy MRC compression. Or even full UTF-8 PDFs format. Those things aren’t updated/implemented anymore from Apple, they prefer to center in cancamusas and sillythingies.

For PDF, DT uses macOS Apple framework, then, anything that don’t work in Preview, won’t work inside DT.

However, if you set PDF default viewer any third party app (I have PDF Expert, but you can have Adobe) in macOS, and enable in DT, General → Interface → Double-click opens document externally, you can open anything inside DT with external default application just double-clicking in the file.

In DTTG seems very strange because they don’t use iOS PDF support but a third party one and that used to be very stable.

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