Ventura, Apple Silicon, and PDFs

[jkershaw]

This is a bug, but I'm having trouble tracking down the source. 

Running ArchiCAD 26 Apple Silicon on Ventura (because that's what my Mac Studio shipped with). Every time I produce a pdf, it temporarily locks up the Finder. Either the Finder cannot preview it, or when I try to open the PDF, Preview or Acrobat give me an error.

I say temporarily because once the Finder crashes and restarts, the PDF works fine. This occurs using both "Save As..." PDF or using the Publisher to create a PDF.

I suspect the issue is with Ventura. I can view the PDF just fine using an Intel Mac with Monterey, but I do not have an ARM running Monterrey to test. So it could be an issue of how AC 26 ARM is outputting the pdf AND how Ventura is then reading that new PDF.

Anyone else running into this? It is a very intrusive bug.

[Lee Hankins]

We’re having a similar issue. I’ve narrowed it down to being linked to moving PDF’s to a different location once they have been published. We use a Synology NAS to store all of our files and Archicad publishes our PDFs to a job folder on the NAS called ‘Drawings to Issue’. Once published we seem to be able to Quick Preview them and open them from that location. As soon as we move them in to the ‘PDF Drawings’ folder we then cannot quick preview or open them. Preview just fails to launch after double-clicking the file. The only way to be able to open them again is to restart Finder or restart the entire machine. This has affected both Intel, ARM and also macOS Monterey and Ventura. 

I have been in contact with Synology support and they found a lot of reports on the internet forums suggesting the issue could be caused by a feature in Adobe Reader called ‘Enhanced Security’. I have turned this off and haven’t noticed the issue since.

it sounds similar to what you are experiencing so it may be worth trying to switch that setting off. 

[jkershaw]

Thank you for the response. We are also saving/publishing pdfs directly to a Synology NAS. We cannot open the originals from the publishing computer (apple silicon), but we can open them from one of our intel machines.

I deactivated the "enhanced security" settings in Adobe Acrobat as you suggested, but that did not resolve the issue of Finder/Preview/Acrobat not being able to open the published pdf until after the Finder resets itself.

Your response confirmed what I suspected - an issue between Apple Silicon and Synology. Browsing the internet revealed plenty of others having the same issue. We use AFP to connect to the Synology. I did a quick test using SMB: published the same pdf and previewed it in the Finder. Lo and behold.... it worked properly. 

I'm going to do some more testing, but it may be time to leave AFP behind and move all connections to SMB.

[Lee Hankins]

We ditched AFP quite some time ago and have used SMB since and still have the same issue. I have an open Support ticket with Synology so I will go back to them and note that their suggested solution hasn't worked. I haven't been able to test it thoroughly yet.

[jkershaw]

Well that's disappointing. What version of Synology DSM are you running? We haven't updated ours in quite a while. 

[Lee Hankins]

We’re on the latest 7. Something. 

[Lee Hankins]

We have just updated to macOS Ventura 13.2 released this week and still get the same issue but at least we now have an error warning.

The quickpreview using spacebar now works but we still cannot open the PDF files. It seems to be fine to open them from where they are published but when we move them to another folder we cannot open them until Finder has been restarted, I am liaising with Synology support.

[jkershaw]

Hi Lee -

I was regularly getting that error using 13.1 while connecting to Synology via AFP.

I have been connecting via SMB3 for two days now, and I have had no such issues. I'm going to update to 13.2 and report back.