PDF export blurry on Big Sur
This comment was split from the discussion: Marked 2.5.44 Beta Testing
Looks like a great release! Just tried the beta on MacOs Big Sur. There is apparently still a PDF rendering issue. The text in the exported PDF seems to be a pixelated image.
Hope this feedback helps.
Bests,
Frederic
Screenshot_2020-07-10_at_08.46.19.png
Screenshot_2020-07-09_at_09.55.38.png
Screenshot_2020-07-10_at_08.46.19.png
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Brett on 11 Jul, 2020 04:31 PM
Hey, I split this off into a new discussion just to help me keep track of it. Big Sur is not yet my primary focus and I have a few other fires to put out, but this is definitely a report that needs to be addressed as we get close to the new OS public release.
2 Posted by rachel on 22 Oct, 2020 12:16 PM
It's getting closerrrrr :-) Just hit this yesterday on Big Sur public beta 9 (and today confirmed it's still present with 10). Spent some time trying to find a relevant setting before thinking of trying it on my Catalina Mac, at which point I came here to report it and found I was late to the party. Exactly as described above: The headers/footers are fine, the body text looks like an antialiased bitmap. btw: i tried changing and removing the
-webkit-font-smoothingcss setting, to no effect, although presumably and obviously it is in Webkit that this is happening. Doesn't seem to matter what font, whether standard (osx built-in), freely downloaded (eg: JetBrains Mono), Apple-downloaded non-free (eg: Proxoma Nova). All affected the same, and all fine on Catalina.Support Staff 3 Posted by Brett on 22 Oct, 2020 01:15 PM
Big Sur is converting pdf export to raster image. There’s nothing I can do about it within the version of WebKit that marked is using. Fixing it is requiring literally a complete rewrite of the app, and will very likely not be ready in time for the Big Sur release.
I don’t know why Apple broke this, but technically this version of WebKit is deprecated. They just deprecated it before adding the features I needed for parity to the new version.
- Brett
Support Staff 4 Posted by Brett on 22 Oct, 2020 01:16 PM
Big Sur is converting pdf export to raster image. There’s nothing I can do about it within the version of WebKit that marked is using. Fixing it is requiring literally a complete rewrite of the app, and will very likely not be ready in time for the Big Sur release.
I don’t know why Apple broke this, but technically this version of WebKit is deprecated. They just deprecated it before adding the features I needed for parity to the new version.
- Brett
Support Staff 5 Posted by Brett on 22 Oct, 2020 01:25 PM
Big Sur is converting pdf export to raster image. There’s nothing I can do about it within the version of WebKit that marked is using. Fixing it is requiring literally a complete rewrite of the app, and will very likely not be ready in time for the Big Sur release.
I don’t know why Apple broke this, but technically this version of WebKit is deprecated. They just deprecated it before adding the features I needed for parity to the new version.
- Brett
6 Posted by rachel on 23 Oct, 2020 09:06 AM
Hm. I had a quick play, exporting from Marked2 as HTML (with embedded css/images) and seeing what browsers can do. (All on Big Sur; I need to see what Safari does on Catalina too)
Safari, surprisingly as presumably it's the same Webkit that Marked2 is linking to(?), didn't render it very well at all, even on screen; its errors related mostly to fonts, as in, I think it was ignoring them. Firefox (Gecko of course) rendered it perfectly.
When saving from each browser as PDF, I had more options in Firefox, eg: to retain table background colours, and make some rudimentary header/footer choices, but still couldn't control page breaks (may need to investigate print css options there). But in both Firefox and Safari, having saved as PDF, the text appears to be text and not rasterised. (Zooming in, it does not pixellate.) All of which implies that it ought to be possible to persuade the Big Sur PDF/print APIs to behave in that respect.
I think Firefox is making use of Big Sur APIs to generate the PDF (eg: intra-document links still don't work, and the PDF source looks similar to Safari's, as in, looks like it was written by the same code), but I haven't yet tried the PDF export on other platforms to see what happens there. I expect to lose the fonts I don't have on those platforms of course (Proxima Nova).
So exporting via Firefox may be my stopgap, especially if I can fix page breaks. Alternatively I guess I finally have a use-case for using VMWare Fusion to run MacOS, as I can then keep a Catalina install around for this purpose after Big Sur's release. For a while.
Support Staff 7 Posted by Brett on 23 Oct, 2020 11:46 AM
As I've said before, Marked uses an older version of WebKit because, up
until very recently, the new version available to third-party apps
didn't have print capability at _all_. I'll be transitioning to the
newer version over the next couple of months, but as you note, it's
still not as good as the older version was prior to Big Sur.
-Brett
8 Posted by rachel on 27 Jan, 2021 11:38 PM
I think this may have been fixed in upstream Big Sur when we weren't looking. (This may be old news to you; I just noticed)
I don't even know why I tried again. I hadn't seen any line in marked2app's version history about it being fixed. I was just having a play around to see if I could work out another workflow that didn't involve keeping a Catalina install in VMware just for this, and tried it again on the offchance.
And now it seems they're not rasterised. text in an exported PDF (either directly or via print) is fully scalable. Big Sur 11.1 (20C69) (Intel); Marked 2 2.6.2 (1010) from App Store.
Support Staff 9 Posted by Brett on 28 Jan, 2021 12:18 AM
Oh, I noticed :).
https://brettterpstra.com/2021/01/18/fixed-marked-2-big-sur-and-blurry-pdfs/
-Brett