What happened to my annotations on this PDF?

I started to annotate a PDF, first on DTTG, then on DT3.
All was fine.
Then I moved to another file, I moved it on a group (don’t know if it matters), went back to the PDF…and all my annotations were mysteriously messed up (see the image).
If I summarize the annotations in a new file, the new file has such characters.
I tried on Markdown, RTF and Sheet: always the same messy result.

Tested then on another PDF, and all went fine.

What’s happening to this PDF?

Unfortunately this looks like a corruption of the text layer caused by the PDFkit framework of macOS. Usually DEVONthink tries to automatically open PDF documents which might be affected as read-only. Which version of macOS do you use? You could also try to duplicate the document and apply OCR to the copy. Does this fix it?

I duplicated the PDF, but the issue was still there.
So I OCRed it, and now it works.
Alas I’ved lost the last annotations I’ve made on DTTG, but it’s manageable.
Thank you!

Do you know which application created the original PDF document? Or did you create it on your own?

It was an AZW3 file I converted to PDF with Calibre.
Again: all was good at the first 40 pages (it’s 170 in total), then it messed up.

Any chance that you could send this PDF to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com after converting it again? Then I could check this, thank you!

Alas I can’t. It’s a confidential document. I’m sorry.

as you say it is confidential, by chance did some annotation encryption setting creep in. just a wild guess, of course.

In fact it wasn’t encrypted.
It’s confidential because it’s part of a project I’m building with other colleagues, so I can’t share it.
The screenshot I’ve posted is part of a citation from another book, one of the many references that we have put inside of the project and the document.

Do you see this occur with any other PDF converted by Calibre?
In the test I ran, there are Identity-H fonts in the file. These could definitely cause an issue with PDFKit.

Alas I’m not able to answer: it was the first time for me.
Furthermore, it didn’t happen right after the conversion, but after many pages and days.