Issue with Intel macOS

Update

With the release of v0.9.2, the issue with Intel macs has been addressed through the highly sophisticated freezing of pikepdf at version 7.2.0. This is not an ideal solution, as it means that any bug fixes or new features in pikepdf will not propagate to PDFStitcher, but it addresses the larger issue for now.

Thanks goes to GitHub users sihil, bilabar, and jbarlow83 for their sleuthing in this issue and for bringing the discussion to my attention. Hopefully in the future we can figure out why openssl isn’t being built in newer pikepdf wheels, but for now Intel mac users should be able to use PDFStitcher normally.

The problem

After updating PDFStitcher to handle large canvas files, I went through my usual process of bundling the Python code for various operating systems using PyInstaller on GitHub action runners. This time, I started getting reports from users with the following message:

Runtime error: unable to load OpenSSL legacy provider

After some investigation, I believe that this is only a problem under the following conditions:

• macOS 13 (Ventura)
• Intel processor (not Apple Silicon)
• Encrypted PDF (I’m not sure if the exact encryption method matters)

The workaround

For now, there are a couple of potential band-aid solutions. The easiest is to remove the PDF encryption through a PDF “unlock” tool, at which point PDFStitcher will behave normally (I don’t like to encourage such things, but I also know that sewists are by and large a respectful bunch and just trying to adapt patterns for their personal use).

Another workaround is to install Python and then install PDFStitcher through pip via the command:

pip3 install pdfstitcher

but you lose the fancy .app packaging and need to run it from the command line by typing pdfstitcher.

The long term solution

Unfortunately, I do not have an Intel mac, which makes finding the root cause of the problem rather tricky. GitHub does have a macOS 13 action runner, and I was able to create a minimal example and replicate the problem here, but a subsequent run of the same workflow did not repeat it. My guess is that not all runners are identical, and something about how QPDF (the PDF library that I use through the Python wrapper Pikepdf) is built on macOS-11 is not compatible with the OpenSSL library on macOS-13. Or maybe there’s a problem with how I’m using PyInstaller, or something else entirely - unfortunately without a consistent way to replicate the problem, I’m just guessing.

My request for help!

If you have encountered this problem, have a bit of programming experience, and are willing to help me figure out what’s going on, please comment on this issue or send me an email.