Unable to merge PDF documents: quiet failure

DEVONthink
1

I was trying to merge a bunch of PDFs from my electric utility provider. I selected all of them, right-clicked, and selected “merge X documents”. Nothing happened except me scratching my head.

To make a long story short, Console (filtering on “DEVONthink”) reported a number of instances of this CGImageCreateCopyByApplyingSoftMask Invalid image alpha followed by WARNING: Text layer of document possibly corrupted by PDFkit framework.

I was able to fix the problem by applying OCR again to each document, but I was curious how this might happen and how to prevent it in the future.

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2

We have no other such reports. If you have the original PDF documents, you could start a support ticket and send some you know have failed.

3

Fixing the problem is a double-edged sword. While I got what I needed, it is no longer reproducible. Thanks though!

4

You’re welcome.
If it happens again, we can investigate from that point.

5

DEVONthink performs a basic validation of generated PDF documents after certain actions (e.g. merging) to prevent text layer corruption by macOS’ PDFkit framework.

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