I know that PDFkit has been a mess, and I’ve lost track of whether DTPO is, or is not, relying on PDFkit by default these days.
The issue occurred on macOS 10.13.4 with DPTO 2.9.17. The PDF in question was a scan that had been made and OCRd by someone other than me (I don’t know the provenance).
I had a PDF+Text open in DTPO. I had confirmed that the OCR layer was present and accurate (using PDF Expert, Safari, and finally, in DTPO, but NEVER preview). I began reading the document in DTPO. After making the first highlight, the application hung (beachball), then the Log window appeared with row indicating “No Text” for the presently-open file.
Indeed, I confirmed using all of the above applications that the OCR layer was now toast. The document could not be searched, anything selected was just blank characters, etc.
I had to restore the document from a backup to retrieve an un-corrupted version.
I can’t trust DTPO as a PDF viewer if it, or the frameworks it relies upon, can corrupt OCR layers! Thankfully opening files in an external application is easy, but its all-too-easy to, on a whim, quickly open a PDF, modify it in some way that causes it to auto-save, and BAM, OCR gone.
Is this just part of the ongoing PDFkit issues? Is this a new problem?