Annotation Opacity in Preview

Hi!

I can confirm that. Thought, it was a messed up installation but clean install proofed me wrong.

One way to "correct" this is to -> export as PDF in preview.

After that, all highlighting shows up normal in the new version even in Acrobat until you change anything.

It is quite annoying though, because I work a lot with pdfs and I do not want to export them everytime I add an annotation and "saving" the file simply doesn't help at all.

Can you see a similar message in the console

revisiond[50]: failed to get generation counter on path...; error 16 (Resource busy)

?

I guess, they changed the way of handling versions and auto-save because I did not find a way to delete old versions and it seems, the file itself now grows a little everytime a change is being made.

At least those changes do not affect highlighting done with Mountain Lion.

Just one tiny warning:

Using "export" and then "pdf" the opacity stays the same (messed up).

Using "export as pdf" directly, all annotations get written into the new document.

You can see the annotations perfectly in Acrobat but you will not be able to change anything anymore!

Better keep a backup of your file.

😠

The error message only appears in the console logs, right after opening the pdf and doing an annotation. It is not a pop-up or anything like that. Did you look there? If not, do you mind?

I have a VM with Windows and am doing my pdf work there right now.

If there will be no fix or no fix for fixing older annotations, using preview makes my work useless...😟

I'm using 10.9 (Maverick) and ran across same issue described in this thread. "Export as PDF" seems to do the trick. You write "but you will not be able to change anything anymore" but when I open it in Acrobat (trial version) it appears to let me make additional changes; so not same as what you say or I don't understand what you meant -- I am not experienced Acrobat/PDF annotator so may well be the latter.

Glad I found this thread, though I wonder if Apple sees this as something to fix (bug) or as what they intended.

It still happens on 10.9.1.

What I meant was, you cannot change the old annotations/highlighting after export. So one should only use this feature when it does not matter that those are unchangeable.

You can of course still add new ones but again, those new ones will be "messed up again".

Holy smoke, SnakeMac. You are so so right. I can't undo the Preview highlighting in either Preview or Acrobat and Exporting as PDF. Which means I have to buy Acrobat for Mac or use my cruddy ancient Windows laptop (which has an old version of Acrobat installed) just for this work.

Thanks much for your rapid and clear followup to my post.

Another piece of info just to complete the circle is that I had/have no problem with annotations on a Mac laptop that has Mountain Lion with Apple Preview v6.

This is why I am thinking about rolling back to Mountain Lion. 😠

I sent a feedback http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html but I'm not sure, if this helps.

I took a look at latest version of Adobe Reader and in Version XI one can highlight, comment, add text markups to any PDF - so my needs are met -- I made Reader the default for PDF files

More info here: http://blogs.adobe.com/vikrant/2010/12/can-i-comment-on-pdfs-using-the-free-adob e-reader/

Problem does still exist in Mavericks 10.9.3...

Maybe a little late but I found a workaround if you want to fix those "broken highlightings" in one step:

Used Adobe Acrobat X Pro Mac (works with Windows as well, tried with Adobe Reader XI):

open PDF -> go to comments (Kommentare) -> filter comments (check type "highlighting")

-> left click on the first comment -> turns yellow and is selected

-> press shift and hold while you scroll down (use left bar if needed) and click on the last comment, then release

-> right click "properties" (Eigenschaften)

-> reselect 100% opacity (Transparenz) again (do not change color)

-> confirm

>> works!

Had to look for a solution after Adobe seemed to have lost all of my comments after I cropped, split and remerged a pdf -> comments were visible in Preview though.🙂

BTW:

Yosemite Beta seems to have it fixed. Finally.

I've had luck with the following JavaScript in Acrobat to fix the opacity of all the highlights in a PDF.

This can be added to your 'Actions' in Acrobat 'Tools' as an 'Execute Javascript' action. Deselecting 'Prompt User' in the Execute JavaScript action keeps the action from prompting you with the JavaScript before executing.

Adding a 'Save' step to the action lets you perform the action on a batch of files or an entire directory.

/*

Change highlight opacity to 100%

(Changing the opacity twice appears to be necessary)

*/

this.syncAnnotScan;

var annots = this.getAnnots();

for(var i = 0; i < annots.length; i++)

{

if(annots[i].type == "Highlight")

{

annots[i].opacity = .1;

annots[i].opacity = 1; / * this is the opacity value between 0 and 1. 60% would be .6

}

}

Line 14 of the code above is missing the comment terminator - add '*/' to line 14. It should be:

annots[i].opacity = 1; / * this is the opacity value between 0 and 1. 60% would be .6 */