Preview.app creates self-suspicious PDFs after modifying scans

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Level 1

4 points

Preview.app creates self-suspicious PDFs after modifying scans

Short: Preview.app (Version 11.0 (1113) and previous) sees its own created pdf's as suspicious!

I very frequently use perview.app to modify a pdf (scans, especially) from a xerox scanner.

For those, I set preview a default application, double-click on the file, and save or export single pages/cropped, etc, independent files.

Double-clicking on those new files results in a security warning, advising to put them to the trash...

How is that even possible?

Even weirder: I can open them from inside the preview by the open menu without warning.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Preview.app creates self-suspicious pdf's

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.0

Posted on Oct 21, 2025 8:12 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,272 points

Oct 21, 2025 12:03 PM in response to tiProton

A scanned PDF is a PDF container surrounding the image of the scanned document — unless your Xerox scanner is also performing an OCR operation on the generated PDF. If your scanner cannot do that, you must open the scanned PDF in Preview and select File menu > Export… and other than the unique OCRd filename, use these settings. It was too simple for Apple to use the recognizable term "OCR" and they used Embed Text instead. This feature has been in Preview since macOS Sonoma 14.*.

Now, when you open that exported PDF, you have a real PDF that you can do other things with and won't receive any security warning. Coincidentally, if you are running any anti-virus software, it is useless on the Mac and can be fully uninstalled.

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