Christiaan Hofman <cmhofman <at> gmail.com> writes: > > > > On Dec 15, 2015, at 4:51, Ed Morehouse <edmo <at> cs.cmu.edu> wrote: > It has been reported in the bug tracker that line and freehand notes are nolonger visible in Skim with OSX versions 10.11.x. Christiaan, thedeveloper, has characterized this as a PDFKit rendering bug and marked it as"open-wont-fix":http://sourceforge.net/p/skim-app/bugs/1059/I would like to know whether anyone on the list has any insight into thecause of this bug. For example, did Apple change the library calls by whichit creates these note types? I noticed that in Apple's own PDF viewer,Preview, these annotation types work fine and that lines now come with acontrol point so that they may be curved.Is there any hope of getting working (and even curving) lines back in Skim? For the type of documents that I work with they are very important andlosing them would force me to move to different document annotation software.thanks,-Ed > > > Yes, Apple apparently changed the drawing code for these annotations. They apparently failed to implement the proper coordinate transformations needed to draw the line in the correct location. > I find it weird that Preview does draw them in the correct location. But I do know that Preview overrides the drawing code for certain annotations. The fact that they have curved lines strongly suggests that they do so in this case, as curves are not really supported by the PDF format. IMHO it is very bad behavior to add custom stuff to an open format such as PDF. Moreover the kind of hacking that is needed to override this is something Apple itself strongly discourages, and it is not the way to go. Bugs should be fixed where they are, not worked around by third parties (we had lots of problems doing that with scrolling bugs in PDFKit.) > > As for fixing, this is Apple’s responsibility, they should really have done that in 10.11.2, as they know about the bug. > > But if Apple won’t fix this bug, I may be forced to add a workaround. But I really don’t want that, because it would be a pretty messy one, and moreover I really don’t want to have a messy legacy override that would still be there when the bug will be fixed in the future (something that may be impossible to avoid). > > > > Christiaan >
hi Christiaan, Thank you for your reply and explanation. I understand your point of view and agree that bugs should be fixed at the source. But I do not know how much hope there is of Apple addressing this one in a timely fashion. As I understand it, they have been fairly unresponsive about fixing similar reported bugs in the past. As far as I can tell, the documentation for PDFKit hasn't been updated since 2007, although I suspect that the library has changed somewhat since then (for example, with the addition of curved lines): https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/GraphicsImaging /Reference/PDFKit_Ref/ I have no right or desire to request that you make changes in Skim to work around Apple's bugs. But a significant loss of functionality is bound to negatively affect users who have come to rely on it, so I just wanted to know what was the cause and whether we can expect a fix. In any case, thank you for all your work on Skim and BibDesk. They have been invaluable tools for me, and I'm sure, for many other people as well. cheers, -Ed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Skim-app-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
