Seemingly out of nowhere (or maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention previously), it appears that Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 is wiping out Finder tags upon saving PDFs, and by extension, killing my ability to find these items within DT3 based on their tags.
I have a database that indexes a folder structure of a few thousand PDFs, all of which are tagged so that they can be easily isolated into categories based on subject matter, citation, jurisdiction, etc. I have had some issues with annotating PDFs recently (e.g., highlighting text causing the record type to be changed from “PDF+text” to “PDF document”) so I have started applying annotations externally, first in Skim but now in Adobe Acrobat Pro since I bit the bullet and purchased it. This doesn’t seem to be happening when I annotate a PDF in Skim and I don’t know whether this would happen if I were using Adobe Acrobat DC.
Has anyone else seen this issue?
Notably, this also happens if I apply my tags in Finder then open the PDF in Acrobat, annotate, and save.
No, this doesn’t happen in Preview. And interestingly, I have realized that it only happens with Acrobat Pro 2020 when deleting an annotation from a PDF. Adding highlights, for example, to a PDF in Acrobat Pro 2020 doesn’t impact Finder tags. I’m assuming this means the cause here is Adobe rather than an issue with DT3/PDFkit?
As Adobe has still not fixed this bug, which is apparently caused by Acrobat removing the xattr (extended file attribute) in which the Finder tags are stored, I am considering enabling the DisableFinderTags hidden preference of DT3.
I assume this would enable me to tag indexed PDF files within DT3 (using mainly the amazing “Assign Tags” script, which has been a godsend for organising my indexed Bookends files) while being able to open and annotate these files with Acrobat Reader. Or am I overlooking something?
Also, I am wondering what will happen if I turn DisableFinderTags off at some point in the future. Will DT3 tags get deleted if the Finder tags have been deleted in the meantime? Will tags from DT3 overwrite tags from the finder or vice versa? Will they somehow be consolidated?
(Before it gets asked: I would generally prefer to open and annotate PDFs in Preview, DT3, or Bookends, but all of these rely on PDFkit, which has an unrelated longstanding and unfixed bug that often causes the little squares that indicate a comment belonging to highlighted text not to show up, which also is a dealbreaker for me.)
Edit: There doesn’t happen to be a way to make tags only sync one way so that the Finder tags just get re-added after being deleted by Acrobat, does it?
I experimented briefly with DisableFinderTags. My initial findings suggest that if the Finder tags have been changed while the preference was enabled, the DT3 tags get overwritten with the Finder tags after disabling the preference. If the Finder tags are empty when disabling the preference, the DT3 tags remain unchanged while the Finder tags remain empty.
I think I’ll just keep DT3 working as intended and give PDF Expert another try instead of Acrobat…
