Thank you for your detailed reply and suggestion to separate into two feedbacks! I will split/update the feedback as soon as I can manage. FYI, I have filed the Page.characterBounds(at:) bug under FB14843671 already in August '24 during the beta cycle. But have so far seen neither any Apple reaction, bug confirmation nor a bug fix. That made me wonder that I missed something or even reported a non-bug. But looking into the issue again in more detail I have to reconfirm my view that there is an Apple framework issue. This means that with iOS 18 release the large majority of the users of my app is completely stripped of a core feature, i.e. importing, semantically analysing and parsing PDF scripts (of actors) because of that bug. Really tough to cope with.

I have sent in two new bug reports, one for Page.string (FB16313297) and one for Page.attributedString (FB16313295). I included screenshots and the sample project that shows the issue in code. Thank you for forwarding these reports to the right people! I really hope that those bugs, especially the characterBounds(at:) bug FB14843671 are fixed soon!

iOS 18.3 beta 3 (22D5055b5) does not fix the issue! I have tested text extraction through the lower level CoreGraphics framework with CGPDFScannerScan(). It returns the same correct text results on iOS 17 and iOS 18! Seems this is a PDFKit bug, not a lower-level CoreGraphics bug. How can I help to further analyse this PDFKit issue and eventually get this Apple framework bug fixed!?

iOS 18.3 does not fix this bug, either! Apple, please!!, fix this bug for iOS 18.4.

Is this iOS 18 only, or does it happen on iOS 17.x and earlier, too?

Hi Randy, seems you are working with CoreGraphics PDF lib. As iOS 18.x still has a PDFKit bug (see here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/762788 ) I have been looking into CG myself. Getting text with a CG Scanner out of a PDF is quite doable, but getting the bounding boxes of those texts is quite a challenge. Since you seem to have experience with Core Graphics PDF routines, can you steer me to same sample code for getting bounding boxes of characters/words/text blocks out of a PDF page with Core Graphics? Thanks for any help! Regards, Klaus.

iOS 18.4 beta 1 and 2 do not fix the issues. Selection.bounds(at: page) delivers more correct results than page.characterBounds(at: index). But not as good as characterBounds(at) for iOS 17 and earlier. // page: PDFPage for (index, character) in page.enumerated() { if character == "\n" || character == "\r" { continue } let range = NSRange(location: index, length: 1) guard let selection = page.selection(for: range) else { continue } let charBounds = selection.bounds(for: page) } Do we still have a chance for a PDFKit bug fix from Apple? Does Apple really think that PDFs are dead and it's not worth keeping its PDF libraries up to date? What about the billions of PDF documents out there and the millions more generated every day? If you need character and word accurate text extraction with precise layout data, LLMs are still no substitute.

iOS 18.4 beta 4 does not fix the issue.

iOS 18.5 still has the same issue.

Any news from Apple on the issue?

You can disable the visibility of the Format panel with .textInputFormattingControlVisibility(.hidden, for: .all)