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preview.app pdf annotation bug

Preview keeps erasing pdf comments upon saving and reopening: I enter some comments on a pdf, save them, and when I reopen them with Preview the yellow square indicating the comment is still there but the text is gone. I only recognized the issue after the High Sierra update. Today's supplemental update did not help. Does anyone have any suggestions?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), macOS High Sierra (10.13)

Posted on Oct 5, 2017 3:59 PM

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6 replies
Question marked as Helpful

Oct 7, 2017 2:42 PM in response to matyasir

Hello and welcome to Apple Support Communities, matyasir.
If I understand your post correctly, you're unable to save comments to PDF files in Preview. I'd like to help.
Safe mode will tell us if the issue is related to a startup item or plugins, and sometimes corrects the issue. This article will tell you how: Use safe mode to isolate issues with your Mac
If everything is working correctly in safe mode, but is not working when you get back to your user account, please check the section titled "If an issue doesn't happen in safe mode" for the next troubleshooting steps.
If the issue continues while in safe mode, a test user will let us know if the issue is isolated to your account, or system wide: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac. If the issue happens in the test user also, then please check the section titled "If an issue happens in more than one user account."

Let us know if that resolves this issue for you.
Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. Take care.

Oct 7, 2017 2:47 PM in response to CarlAVII

Thank you so much, I will try to reproduce the issue in safe mode.


Before I do that I want to clarify one detail:


The issue is less about being unable to save annotations, and more about having bugs with saved annotations. For example, I can make a few comments on a pdf with Preview, save the file, and next time I'm opening it with Preview (or any other pdf viewer) some, but not all comments will lose their content, while the yellow boxes are still there. For all I know, it is completely random which ones will go away, the comments are all normal plain text comments.

Nov 20, 2017 6:22 PM in response to AMDtonix

I can confirm all of the above. The suggestion by Allen A presupposes that there is another application that is not of Apple origin causing the problem. The assumption is disingenuous at best. This is a bug in Preview and needs to be sorted. The bug has been shown to persist in Safe Mode, therefore it is not influenced by other apps and extensions.


Not too, My MBP is new (end 2017) and High Sierra installed last week.

Dec 3, 2017 5:57 PM in response to matyasir

Agreed that in my experience too, macOS 10.13's Preview.app (e.g., Version 10.0 (944.2)) has broken the PDF annotation system for some documents when viewed through Preview.app. In the problem cases, when looking at the "Highlights & Notes" sidebar, the highlighted text, e.g., using strike-through, ends up offset from the text originally selected. Notes added to highlights become unavailable too. Acrobat Reader correctly retrieves and displays the annotations even when Preview.app can't, however.

preview.app pdf annotation bug

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