#1617 macOS Golden Gate breaks annotations and causes severe visual blurring on M5 MacBook Pro
Summary:
Visual distortion and broken annotations on macOS 27.0.
Detailed Description:
Overview
Following a recent update to macOS Golden Gate, Skim exhibits severe visual bugs and app instability. Adding, editing, or viewing highlights and notes fails to render text overlays correctly, and text boxes become highly blurry or distorted.
Steps to Reproduce
- Open a PDF document in Skim.
- Attempt to add, edit, or view an annotation (highlight or note).
Actual Results
The annotation text overlays fail to render correctly, and the text boxes become severely blurry and distorted, making the app unusable.
Expected Results
Annotations should render sharply and correctly without any visual distortion or blurriness.
Configuration
- Skim Version: 1.7.15 (167)
- OS Version: macOS Golden Gate 27.0
- Hardware: MacBook Pro (Base Model, M5 chip)
- Localization: English (implied)
Samples
Attached.
Additional Information
I am attaching a screenshot to illustrate the visual distortion. Please let me know if you need specific crash logs, console outputs, or sample files to help debug this.
NOTE: I have updated the Skim version to version 1.7.16 (168) and the error still persists
I am not sure exactly what I should be looking at on the screenshots. I see nothing in Untitled 10 and 9, Are you talking about the blurry text with white background in Untitled 8? Is that a text note? We do not draw the annotations, that is don't completely by Apple's PDFKit. We merely add the data to the document. So this sounds more like an Apple bug, and I see no way we could fix that. So this is more a bug you should report to Apple.
Hi Christiaan,
Thank you for reaching out.
In Untitled 9, the text bubbles are not supposed to appear. This issue did not exist in MacOS Tahoe. As you can see in the screenshot, these unnecessary text bubbles overlap and obscure the actual document text underneath. This bug consistently occurs when using the Highlight, Underline, and Strikethrough and other similar tools.
In Untitled 10, if you zoom in, you can clearly see how blurred the annotations are (marked in red). Again, this pixelation and lack of clarity was not the case in previous versions.
In Untitled 8, the green-coloured chat/text bubbles are visible when they shouldn't be. Additionally, the text-note itself appears blurry. Please note, however, that the white transparent background is a deliberate setting choice I made and is not part of the bug.
I plan to report these regressions directly to Apple as well, but I wanted to share these details with you first to confirm if these are known issues or if they are expected behaviors in the current build. I regret that I do not have screenshots of how this looked in Tahoe to provide a direct visual comparison, but I hope these descriptions help clarify the problems.
OK, I see now. Indeed the text and freehand note are drawn at low resolution. But as I said, we leave the rendering to Apple's PDFKit, so I don't see how we could fix this. The only thing I could think of from our side is that Apple (deliberately) messes up the drawing of the legacy annotation classes that we use (as Apple was always using these consistently). But changing that would be a considerable rewrite of our code.
As for the extra text bubbles (they are called popup annotations), it is annoying that Apple now automatically adds these to markup notes. Especially as they are annoyingly blocking text. They should just do what we tell them to do. We will have to remove those explicitly.
Thanks for looking into this, Christiaan.
I get it that PDFKit's rendering of legacy annotations is out of your hands if it requires a major rewrite.
I'm really glad to hear you'll be able to explicitly remove those automatic popup text bubbles, though! That will make a huge difference in usability since they currently block so much text.Thanks again for your time and effort on this.
Well, I am not sure it is really about being legacy annotations, but it is the only thing I can think if if it is not a general bug in PDFKit.
Also, I am not yet sure whether we will be able to remove these popup bubbles, but we were able to do this for anchored notes, where they were added in a much earlier PDFKit version. Is this only occurring for markup annotations (Highlight, Strike Out and Underline)?
I build a test project to see whether we can remove the popups at https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/Skim.zip. Could you download this and test it out?
Sure I ran the application. But the issue still persists.
Strange, this worked for anchored notes.
I put up a new test version with a more aggressive removal. Can you try that?
I used the link from the original comment. Did you put the updated version on that comment, because it didn't work out either :(
Just one more thing; I don’t want to be pushy, but please do keep me posted here if there’s any progress on sorting this out.
Really? We do explicitly remove these popups in the latest test version. If this does not work, I really do not know how it would be possible to ever remove them.
As this is a problem created by Apple, you should also really petition them on this, I am afraid they are the only ones to be able to fix this (though I am also afraid they won';t even see this as a bug).
I placed a new test version at the same link, with some more aggressive removal of popup bubbles. Can you try it out?
Oh, ok. Yes, this issue is happening with markup annotations. I am not aware if this is happening with other stuff as well.
Hey Christiaan,
I just wanted to let you know that even though this picture is from an older Skim version on High Sierra, it's identical to how it looked when I last used Skim on Tahoe. You can easily spot the differences between this old layout and the newer screenshots. Hope this helps :)
A workaround to get rid of the popup bubbles is to clear the text of the markup notes. You should then also avoid having it automatically et when adding a markup note. You do that by unchecking Notes > Adding Note > Set Text From Selection.