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Just getting into this issue now (summer of 2012) ...

Is there anywhere I can search for an official Apple documentation of this issue?

Seems like a long time for this to go unresolved.

In case any developers read this, here's how to reproduce it.

1. Download this file: http://www.prideagenda.org/Portals/0/1324%20Rights%20and%20Responsibilities_FINA L.pdf
2. Copy and paste some text from it (note it works fine)
3. Highlight something
4. Save the file, and close it.
5. Reopen it
6. Try to copy and paste, and it won't work. Search will also be broken.

I am having the same problem that has already been described in detail in previous messages to this thread. It is really frustrating that Apple has not fixed this bug yet after such a long time. Being able to search within PDF documents, copy+paste text, and annotate documents are all really important functions which should be compatible.

Here are some more details about the problem as I have experienced it:

The problem is that saving from within Preview corrupts some PDF documents such that the text search and copy+paste functions no longer work properly. The text characters seem to be read as nonsense characters by the search and copy+paste functions. (For example, when I searched a document for "R", the search returned all of the "7"'s in the document.)

This problem occurs regardless of whether any annotations have been added to the document: simply openning a PDF in Preview and saving an additional copy of it using the "save as" function causes the search and copy+paste functions to be broken in the saved copy. (However, opening the same document in Adobe Reader and saving a copy does not cause this problem.)

As noted, in previous posts, this problem occurs with some PDF's, but not others.

Perhaps a "work-around" for this problem can be found. Does anyone know of an application with the capability to annotate PDF documents (such as highlighting text and adding notes) that works well on Mac and does not corrupt some PDF's like Preview does? Ideally, I am looking for an application that is free or low cost.

I have been dealing with this issue for a while. And I can confirm that following lukeberg 's post, I can reproduce the bug. I hope someone finds a workaround.

I called Apple in August 2012 to report this bug. The Apple representative I spoke to was able to reproduce the bug on his end. He thanked me for reporting the bug and said that he was passing it on to Apple's engineers, who will need to develop a software update to fix the bug. It did not sound like this bug fix was viewed as a very high priority. Perhaps if others contact Apple too, and tell them how important these functions are, it might help to bump this issue up on their priority list. (They do not necessicarily read this forum.) In the mean time, the only workaround that I am aware of, for those of us who need to mark up PDF documents, is to buy PDF Professional and use that instead of Preview.

I have given up using Preview. It just mangles PDF files randomly. Fortunately, I found that Skim works just fine. You can dowload it from here.

same issue here. it's 2013...