Catalina, PDFs and Acrobat Reader

[Buadhai]

My wife is a Thai attorney who has to deal with PDFs all the time for submission to court and other government agencies. Some of these government forms have fillable fields and others are just blank forms that you have to complete by adding text boxes. She's always used Acrobat Reader and been pleased with the results.

That is, until I convinced her to install Catalina (mainly so we could share files on iCloud Drive). The version of Reader she was using was 32 bit so she had to upgrade. The 64 bit Catalina-compatible version is useless for her.

• You can't enter Thai text. There's no place to select the typeface (font). If you select Thai as the input method on the Mac and type, nothing happens:

You can "Type text here" but nothing happens.

• You can't edit Thai text that is already on the PDF document:

What the document looks like in Reader

What it looks like when you try to edit the text in Reader.

I hate Acrobat Reader and have never much used it. However, I don't spend much of my life dealing with PDFs.

So, I persuaded her to give Preview a try. Preview seems to do what she wants, with one giant caveat. Many of the documents she edited in Preview are not viewable in Reader. She gets an error messages like this:

And, sure enough, the document does not display properly.

One workaround seems to be to have Preview either export the document as a PDF or print to PDF. These PDFs are viewable in Reader.

So, the lingering concern is: Will the courts and other government agencies be able to view documents that she has created/edited via Preview?

 

[psingh01]

In theory it should work without issue assuming everyone has up to date software. PDF is a standard that both of these applications should adhere too. It could be a limitation of this version of Reader to display Thai text in an editable PDF. Do you still have the 32 bit version of reader? You can try viewing the PDFs there and see if it looks ok. The PDFExpert is another PDF app that seems to have good reviews on Mac. Maybe that is an alternative she can try. Another option is to run Mojave in a VM and install your old 32 bit Reader there since you know it works. I did that for a while so I could keep running my old CS3 suite.

 

[Anony-mouse]

Compatibility between Preview and Acrobat Reader has been getting worse in the past year or so. I think there are some changes in Acrobat Reader DC (the version I'm using) vs. Preview in terms of inserted comments and text.

Even Acrobat on iPad vs. Acrobat on Mac has some incompatibilities. I'd get spurious comment and markup blocks when viewing a document in Acrobat for Mac marked up on iPad.

Nonetheless, if you Print to PDF, I think the files themselves should be portable, just that you can't modify the comments/notes that were inserted into the earlier version of the PDF file.

 

[Buadhai]

I've never been much of a user of Adobe products with the exception of the notorious Flash. After struggling with Reader for more hours than I'd like to admit over the past three days I find myself wondering how and why the company manages to stay in business.

I have an old Mac mini running High Sierra. I decided to install the pre-Catalina version (2019 - 32 bit) of Reader there to see if it could read the PDF edited with Preview on the iMac (Catalina). It could not, but it did give me a different error message advising me to install a font pack. Font Pack? Who knew? My wife has already installed a gazillion Thai fonts on all of our machines and we've told Reader to use local fonts. But, what the heck. (AFAIK, there is no Comic Sans font for Thai.)

I went to the Macintosh Font Packs page only to discover a confusing mishmash of information. Apparently Adobe has divided its products into tracks: continuous and classic; whatever that means. But, you must match the product you have with its track in order to figure out what font pack to install. Based on the 64 bit version that I installed: 2020.012.20041 I need a "continuous track" version of the font pack for version 2020. This does not exist. There is a continuous font pack for version 2019 and a classic track font pack for Acrobat 2020. I downloaded both of these. I was unable to install the classic font pack for Acrobat 2020 but I was able to install the continuous font pack for version 2019, even though I have version 2020 installed. Alas, it did not help on either the iMac (version 2020) or the Mac Mini (version 2019).

As far as running a virtual Mojave machine goes, I think this is beyond my wife's technical pay grade. Plus, the failure of version 2019 on the old Mac mini makes me think that this effort might not help much.

I should note that Adobe Reader on the iPad can read any of the files my wife shared with me that she created and/or edited on her MBA using either Preview or Reader. So can any of the other PDF capable apps that I have installed.

At this point I'm sure that there is a major difference of opinion between Apple and Adobe as to what constitutes a standard PDF file. I have no idea who is right and I'm sure I never will.

In the mean time, Catalina has forced my wife into a tedious workflow in order to make sure her documents can be read by all:

• Mark up and fill the document using Preview on the Mac
• Print or export the document as a PDF
• Open the exported/printed document using Adobe Reader in order to assess compatibility

This is ridiculous, especially for someone for whom time is money. I hate to think bout me running out of beer before she runs out of work.

 

[Anony-mouse]

I sympathize, but I don't use foreign language fonts with Adobe so I can't comment much.

Nonetheless, there is one advantage of Acrobat over Preview. I have had scanned PDFs which failed to print to an old networked HP Color laser printer from macOS Preview but printed successfully from Acrobat Reader. I suspect there is some image compression vs. RAM utilization issue in Preview which Acrobat Reader worked around.

Anyway, PDFs used to be simple and cross platform after the early days of lacking compatible readers. Preview was one of the best PDF readers when it was first introduced. Nowadays it's become a pain again since Apple started reimplementing Preview (for code sharing with iOS, I suspect) and Adobe decided that they could not survive without messing with the PDF file format.

 

[Buadhai]

After much consultation with the family attorney I finally determined that the version of Adobe Reader she was using pre-Catalina was 11.x. It dates from 2015. I installed it on the Mac Mini. As she claimed, it works a charm for Thai language input. So easy to edit and enter Thai text. One wonders why they crippled recent version by removing this useful functionality. Amazing Adobe.

So, now we have one faithful workhorse, decade old Mac running a version of Reader that can speak Thai. (A feat that I have never managed.)

Aside: Affer using 11.x I can understand why she likes it. It has a very plain and simple layout with none of the Candyland icons, panes and mystifying toolbars that needlessly clutter the current version. What a confusing mess. Once again, Amazing Adobe.