Big Sur is out of beta, and custom CIFilters are still broken. "Do built-in filters like CIGaussianBlur still work?" - yes, Apple-made filters, such as CIColorMonochrome or CIGaussianBlur work fine on Big Sur, but anything custom, even the most basic filter written as per the Core Image Programming Guide, fails on Big Sur but works on Catalina and older macOS versions. It is deeply disconcerting that such a glaring bug was not fixed at the beta stage.

I've found this thread while looking for a solution to the deprecated "flatten/unflatten" arguments. Thanks, great info! However, I can't figure out what to do if my plain text (not RTF!) SLA text contains non-ASCII characters. Suppose I want to add, say, the Greek Omega letter to my text. I tried to base64-encode Unicode strings, but when I mount the resulting DMG, the SLA text displays gibberish in place of non-Latin chars. As the input to the base64 encoding function, I've tried: UTF8 UTF8 with a 3-byte BOM UTF16 UTF16 with a 2-byte BOM None of the above works. Is there a way to do what I want, or the whole thing doesn't even support Unicode?