[HN Gopher] Preview, the Mac app people forget about
___________________________________________________________________
Preview, the Mac app people forget about
Author : curiousBadger
Score : 377 points
Date : 2022-05-09 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fourth-wall.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fourth-wall.co.uk)
| em-bee wrote:
| every time i open a document with preview, it insists on opening
| all the documents i had open before. i must be doing something
| wrong, and find a different workflow, maybe instead of closing
| the app, i need to manually close each document that i don't need
| anymore.
|
| i guess it's not an issue if you use preview often and keep it
| running all the time, but i rarely need it since most of what i
| do is either terminal or browser based or uses a dedicated
| application.
|
| but when i open a document i expect that document to be opened,
| and nothing else.
|
| this would work a lot better if preview would put all documents
| in tabs so that only the document i asked for is visible while
| the rest are hidden in the other tabs.
| [deleted]
| xenadu02 wrote:
| The Mac is document-centric, not app centric. The intended
| working model is you just open documents in Preview and close
| them when you're done. You don't concern yourself with whether
| Preview is running or not.
|
| If you Command-Q to quit Preview you are observing State
| Restoration - the intent there being that if the system is low
| on memory and the app is not visible or being used the system
| could quit the app then re-launch it later. Or you can reboot
| and upon login everything goes back to how it was. Some of this
| is not as transparent on macOS as it is on iOS because it was
| added to the Mac much much later, but even many third party
| apps implement it (probably because NSDocument/NSApplication
| provide good built-in support).
|
| Any documents open in a state-aware app that quits get re-
| opened when it launches again. Hold down Option to skip state
| restoration. This works for any app by the way: Hold Option to
| skip re-opening projects in Xcode or documents in Pages.
| wtallis wrote:
| Generally speaking, on macOS manually quitting an application
| is not part of the intended workflow. When you're done with a
| document, you close that document's window. The app can
| continue to be open in the background with zero windows, and
| will be closed by the OS automatically if it needs to reclaim
| the resources. Manually quitting the application is unnecessary
| micromanaging.
| _moof wrote:
| This is an OS-level thing where apps can act more "iOS-like" by
| saving and restoring their state when they're closed/opened. I
| agree, it's annoying.
|
| There might be a way to turn it off but in the meantime you can
| press command-option-W to close all windows.
|
| EDIT: You can disable this globally in System Preferences, or
| on a per-app basis by writing to the app's defaults:
| defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool
| false
| 0898 wrote:
| Love Preview, but the markup features are seriously confusing. It
| isn't clear how the shapes and the colours relate to one another,
| so even after 12 years drawing a filled box is much harder than
| it needs to be.
| CyanDeparture wrote:
| One massive I'd add to this list that got added recently - being
| able to copy and paste text out of images. I'm so often sent a
| screenshot with a url in the url bar, I can now copy and paste
| that screenshot of a url. It's been massively the past month
| since I noticed it. Not sure how long it's been there, I assume
| not long, maybe last OS update.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Anybody know how to override this feature when you're just
| trying to draw a selection rectangle over the image? The App
| keeps recognising the portion under my pointer as text and
| changing the pointer to a text selection caret instead.
| Tagbert wrote:
| That is called Live Text and was introduced in Mac OS 12
| Monterey. It is available for any app that uses the standard
| libraries to display images so you will see it in other apps,
| too, like Safari.
|
| https://www.macworld.com/article/351669/macos-monterey-how-t...
| MBCook wrote:
| It's one of those transformative little features. But it's
| especially great in PDFs where it's not a "real" PDF but just
| a collection of page sized images so you couldn't normally
| select the text before without OCR software of some sort.
|
| Having it built into the OS is so handy.
| dschuessler wrote:
| I tried it with one of these image-based PDFs and didn't
| get it to work. Is this Apple-Silicon-only? Or is there any
| other step you need to do?
| Tagbert wrote:
| It is possible that it is AS only. It may use the machine
| learning components of AS.
|
| Edit: As of July of 2021, Live Text was available in beta
| on Intel Macs so by the time Monterey shipped it worked
| on both Intel and AS.
|
| Whether it works on a given document may depend on how
| that app displays the image. I can see where it would be
| complicated in a PDF where you may have combinations of
| text, images, and OCR'd text behind images.
| MBCook wrote:
| I'm not going to pretend it works 100% of the time. I
| don't know if that's the issue.
|
| It works with anything that works with Monterey. So if
| you are running macOS Monterey you fit the requirements.
| drcongo wrote:
| Particularly useful for Twitter announcements on Twitter,
| where in order to say anything of value they have to tweet an
| image of some text.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| To get this functionality _everywhere_ , I've taken using the
| TRex app: https://github.com/amebalabs/TRex
|
| I have it mapped to ctrl-alt-command-C. As more and more apps
| and webpages make text unselectable, it's become invaluable. My
| favorite trick is to copy the URL when someone is screen
| sharing their browser in a virtual meeting!
| zora_goron wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about TRex! I've been using
| TextSniper (https://textsniper.app) for this functionality --
| not sure how these two compare, feature-wise.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| And I didn't know about TextSniper. FWIW, TRex has only
| failed me less than 1 out of a hundred times, and only in
| edge cases like getting a crazy complicated URL from a tiny
| fuzzy web call. I also like that it's open source.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Question: Preview used to have automatic detection for "lines"
| and stuff so you could click on one and it'd create a text box
| for you to start typing, correctly sized and everything. For some
| reason this seems to no longer work for me. Has anyone else had
| success with this in the recent past?
| spookybones wrote:
| I think form detection has to do with how the source PDF is
| saved, such as if the PDF is flattened. Also, this feature
| doesn't work with some other formats, like JPEGs. If it's not
| working, there is a text box tool in the markup toolbar.
| akeck wrote:
| I haven't forgotten. I use it everyday. One issue is that it has
| gone for sizable lengths of time with frustrating unfixed bugs.
| For example, there was a period during which if I wanted to
| quickly peek at Nikon raw file with it, I'd have to wait a minute
| or more for it to load the file. A few years ago, it was pretty
| crashy viewing PDFs, one of its primary uses. It's better now,
| and I hope Apple continues to refocus on their classic levels of
| reliability. Preview for me really is an "Everyday Thing".
| agys wrote:
| Preview is very much part of my daily tools:
| signing/splitting/editing PDFs and images (even animated GIFs!)
| etc.
|
| The only thing that bothers me slightly is the weird "File" menu:
| along with some other macOS apps (Textedit for example) they
| renounced the old "Save as" in favour of "Duplicate", "Move",
| etc. I never exactly know what happens with those commands.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Duplicate is basically the same as save as, but they've swapped
| the order of operations. Save as would have you pick a
| destination, then start editing. Duplicate lets you edit and
| then choose where to save. I'm guessing part of the reason for
| the change was also that save as sounds like "rename" when it
| is in fact "duplicate under a new name"
| mLuby wrote:
| Preview can photoshop images too, with a bit of effort. Wish it
| had a smudge/blur tool though.
|
| * https://imgur.com/D1G9h63 Removed people on either side of the
| arch.
|
| * https://imgur.com/iZazOgA Removed people above the person's
| head.
|
| * https://imgur.com/taMCXpC Removed graffiti from below the
| carving's hand.
|
| P.S. Get with the times HN; even Google Docs supports Markdown
| now.
| realstacktrace wrote:
| Blur would be a killer feature in Preview!
| incanus77 wrote:
| I use all of these features all of the time. It's a great
| program, and so under-appreciated as just a cog in the OS.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Such a terrible name for a software that does much more than just
| a "Preview".
|
| Honestly all this time I was under the impression that it's only
| good for previewing and nothing else.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I use many of these features often and it often blows my mind
| just how much better Preview is with PDFs than any other program.
| It's leaps ahead of anything Adobe's Acrobat spyware ever was and
| it comes with your OS right out of the box.
| colanderman wrote:
| I don't understand. Preview is by far the slowest PDF viewer
| I've ever used. Scrolling through 100+page documents brings it
| to its knees.
|
| Gthumb in my experience is _far_ more performant. Scrolls like
| butter, regardless of PDF size. But unfortunately I don 't
| think there's a macOS native UI port.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I remember in the early 2000s, right around the time that
| Acrobat Reader had started rapidly bloating and becoming worse,
| upgrading to the first release of OS X and feeling relieved
| after finding out that installing Reader wouldn't be necessary.
| Even in the buggy slow mess that was OS X 10.0.4, Preview was
| still a great deal better than Reader at most of the things
| you'd use a PDF app for.
| Macha wrote:
| SumatraPDF is what you want as a windows user (yes, ignore the
| website looks like it's from the 90s). No upsells like
| acrobat/foxit, better compatibility than pdf.js like your
| browser.
|
| Linux I mostly use evince (included if you use a Gnome based
| distro), but it's clearly the weakest of
| Preview/SumatraPDF/evince, as someone who uses all 3 regularly.
| Still better than Acrobat Reader though.
| kjksf wrote:
| Hey, I just updated the website
| https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org (for reference, the old one:
| https://sumatra-website-preview.onrender.com/free-pdf-
| reader).
|
| Does it look better? Maybe early 2000?
| throwmeback wrote:
| Looks great!
| kjksf wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Also, in pre-release version I've added a feature that
| I'm super stoked about: a command palette
| https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/docs/Command-Palette
|
| And fully customizable keyboard shortucts
| https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/docs/Customizing-
| keyboard-s...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Apparently "Apple's Core Graphics framework uses the PDF format
| for its internal vector graphics presentation."
|
| https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2020/apple-and-pdf-history/
| mlex wrote:
| Speaking as an iOS developer, we use PDF files to represent
| our vector icon assets in the app.
|
| I thought it was a bit odd of a choice on the platform vs SVG
| which seems more popular (and which the Android devs on our
| team use), but CoreGraphics using it internally ties the
| whole picture together.
| lordgilman wrote:
| The memory is mostly lost to time but MacOS X before 10.4
| (released in 2005) took PDF screenshots of the desktop.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think that pissed a lot of people off, ha ha. But if you
| had multiple displays .... multi-page PDF. PNG still can't
| do that. :-)
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah, there was a switch to PDF from Display PostScript at
| the time of the NeXT merger.
| Bondi_Blue wrote:
| Another underrated feature: add Quartz Filters to a PDF file by
| Choosing File > Export, click the Quartz Filter pop-up menu, then
| choose a filter. You can create custom Quartz Filters in
| ColorSync Utility.app (Note: these are not the same as Quartz
| Composition Filters, which live in Automator workflows and Photo
| Booth.app).
|
| For some inspiration: https://github.com/joshcarr/Apple-Quartz-
| Filters
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Yes - agreed. This is one of the best ways to shrink the file
| size of a PDF: and if it's not shrinking it enough create your
| own quartz filter with lower res/quality JPG or DPI settings.
| SamBam wrote:
| Signatures stamps are great, but the signature-creation method is
| absurd.
|
| Ok, there is something cryptographically special about a
| signature image, which means we can't just import a file, it has
| to be created while in the program, and it gets stored on the
| keychain. Fine. But then why not _also_ give us the ability to
| add an arbitrary stamp from an image? Why have the _only_ method
| for adding a stamp to a PDF be through the signatures?
|
| I have a fine signature as an image, which didn't survive the
| switch to a new Mac because it's not a plain image and you have
| to jump through hoops to bring it across keychains. I also have a
| stamp that I use. I can't import either of these into Preview,
| and my only option for the former is a terrible scrawl on the
| touchpad, or holding up an image in front of the camera and
| hoping it's not too distorted. Why?
| r00fus wrote:
| I think you answered your own question - both of the Apple-
| allowed methods described require a human in the loop. Your
| approach could more easily be automated and thus forged.
|
| Why this is a big deal? Not sure but it seems the best bet.
| Would love to see this confirmed.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Because fundamentally Apple computers do not put you at the
| center of your computer, they put Apple there.
|
| For example, on the new M1 computers, iOS apps stop functioning
| if SIP is disabled. Why? This is entirely artificial, because
| the iOS app model depends on you not being able to do whatever
| you want with the device you own. Contrast this with open
| source where this sort of restriction would just be patched
| away.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I use it every day for splitting and joining PDF files.
| spicymaki wrote:
| I use this daily for taking screen caps after I solve my daily
| Wordle.
| jedberg wrote:
| I love preview -- I've done every one of these things in it. I
| also use it to crop images all the time. Not only can you select
| a rectangle, but it also has a magic wand selector where you can
| draw an outline of what you want to select and it will find the
| borders for you.
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, Preview is awesome. I remember when I learned about adding
| signatures to docs, I was blown away at how awesome the import
| procedure was - sign on a piece of paper (sharpie works well),
| hold it up to your webcam, voila! Natural looking signature on
| hundreds of docs since.
|
| Preview is one of the biggest things I've missed every time I've
| tried to finally make Linux my daily driver.
| smcl wrote:
| You get an obnoxious modal popup asking you to sign up for
| something about 10 seconds after opening the page. I don't even
| know what I'm looking at yet, why would I hand over my name and
| email address? Instant ctrl-w, no thanks.
| criddell wrote:
| Read it through archive.org and you don't get the popup:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220509170301/https://www.fourt...
| smcl wrote:
| Good shout, it's just stupid and annoying to get nagged for
| shit like this. Not to mention counterproductive. I dunno,
| maybe I'm just overreacting.
| maxwelldone wrote:
| As an engineer and from a common sense perspective, these
| modals bother me a lot. However, in the interest of curiosity,
| I'd like to hear from PMs and the likes as to how successful
| these annoyances are in reality.
|
| Broadly, I see two types of visitors to these kinda sites:
|
| 1. Someone new, who's most likely just following a link (like
| us) - they haven't even had a chance to read the article yet &
| knows nothing about the site, it's reputation, quality etc. All
| a pop up does is annoy a new visitor. I highly doubt people
| will take the time or even trust to give away their email with
| no obvious benefit.
|
| 2. A repeat user, someone who's familiar with the site. What's
| wrong with placing a simple signup form at the end of the
| article. It's unobtrusive & if people really like your stuff,
| they will sign up.
|
| Or is it the case that people like us are not the target
| audience - they couldn't give two shit*s whether we stay on the
| page or not. Fortunately I haven't had to deal with SEO and
| shoving stuff on users to sell my stuff, so perhaps I'm naive.
| drcongo wrote:
| Many many years ago, when this trend first appeared, I made
| the Tumblr Tab Closed; Didn't Read [0] - it got retweeted by
| some web luminaries like Eric Meyer and Tim Berners Lee and,
| while the vast majority of the replies I got were in huge
| agreement, there were a bunch of "growth hackers" absolutely
| furious that I'd made it and now everyone hates them. So I
| wrote this [1].
|
| The key takeaway is that "growth hackers" _only_ care about
| conversions. They don 't care if it pissed people off, or if
| someone only signed up because they couldn't see the close
| button etc. Just some numbers that help them justify their
| pay packet.
|
| [0] https://tabcloseddidntread.com
|
| [1] https://andybeaumont.com/post/the-value-of-content/
|
| _Disclaimer:_ Back in 2013 when I wrote [1] Medium wasn 't
| the growth hacker clown car that it is today. And actually,
| nor was Tumblr.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I find it ironic that your [0] link is guilty of the very
| sin it moans about.
| vestrigi wrote:
| Only thing Preview is weak at is filling out PDFs. I often have
| to place my own text boxes by hand and when text boxes are
| recognized the entered text is often oddly formatted.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| I want preview on iOS!!
| saagarjha wrote:
| The file preview has some of the features of the macOS app,
| like basic editing of PDFs.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Yes but where it fails is allowing a rectangular selection to
| be made and copied over to eg Pages to make a composition.
| dschuessler wrote:
| Preview is one of the single-best pieces of software I use in my
| daily life. It manages to be incredibly powerful without bloating
| the UI while still remaining usable. It is unfortunate the name
| suggests it being a simple preview application. It's far from it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I feel like it (when a NeXt app) was literally for previewing
| print jobs? I was never a NeXT guy though so maybe someone can
| correct me.
| realstacktrace wrote:
| I agree it's poorly named. "Visual File Processing Tool" is the
| best I can come up with, which is even worse.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Preview is awesome; love how Cmd-N for a new file will
| automatically use image contents from clipboard if present.
| jkubicek wrote:
| Lack of any equivalent Preview app on the iPad is the main factor
| that's prevented me from switching to an iPad as my full-time
| computing device. Filling in form PDFs, signing documents,
| performing some light editing is so easy in macOS and so
| challenging on iPadOS.
| macintux wrote:
| I'll freely admit I haven't tried all of those tasks, but I've
| been happy with GoodReader.
|
| (But I'll definitely agree: Preview for iPad is a big gap in
| Apple's offering.)
| realstacktrace wrote:
| This. Bring Preview to iPad!
| CalChris wrote:
| I switched over and mostly use _Skim_ for doc viewing but I have
| used _Preview_ for merging PDFs. I won 't install _Acrobat_
| anymore.
|
| https://skim-app.sourceforge.io
| atonse wrote:
| I've used preview to sign hundreds of PDFs and love showing
| people that little feature that is invaluable.
| haroldp wrote:
| I recently discovered that the signing feature can use an
| associated iPhone or iPad (with stylus!) as the signing device
| where you write your signature.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| You can also sign a piece of paper and hold it up to the
| camera to create the signature it uses.
| atonse wrote:
| I tell people this is one of those features which is why
| people are fans of macOS.
|
| Stuff is just part of the system for years and years and we
| take it for granted when other systems don't have these
| kinds of features.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| This is sometimes true on a hardware level, too. For
| example, I was using a Bluetooth Plantronics headset for
| voice chat on my iMac G5 in 2005 because Macs had come
| standard with Bluetooth for a year or two at that point.
| It wouldn't be for another 5 years or so for midrange-
| and-above prebuilt laptops to start coming with BT and it
| wasn't until the past 5 or so years that enthusiast
| motherboards and desktops started reliably coming with
| it.
|
| The latest feature like this is Thunderbolt, which is
| starting to become more common on generic laptops, but is
| still surprisingly hard to come by in prebuilt PC
| desktops and enthusiast motherboards.
| atonse wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbolt since TB 1, was it 2011? It
| was mind blowing at the time. With the original Apple TB
| Display it was so great to be able to just connect to the
| display and also get ethernet and my laptop charged.
|
| I want Apple to have healthy competition to keep them on
| their feet but they often just run a different race.
|
| (I have LOTS of complaints about Apple stuff, I am not a
| fanboy, but as a technologist, I like that they push the
| envelope and raise the bar in many areas).
|
| I'm especially glad that we seem to be out of the Jony
| Ive era where every design decision was a head-scratcher.
| swlkr wrote:
| I'm a big Preview user, it does little photo editing/resizing
| things so well, glad to see it get some recognition on HN
| contradictioned wrote:
| Preview is one of my most loved pdf viewers, next to skim for
| latex writing.
|
| I often have pdfs from my scanner which I want to join into a
| single document or remove back sides which accidentally got
| picked up by the duplex scan. It's so easy with preview; if only
| it could do ocr...
| t_mann wrote:
| Pretty crazy if you think about it. Windows users are relegated
| to third-party apps, and even they don't come close to that in
| functionality. Merging and rearranging is such a pain, I've even
| resorted to using web apps on questionable sites sometimes.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Maybe that balances out against the fact that Mac OS has
| rudimentary window management and users need third party apps
| to fill that gap while Windows has decent window management
| built in. :-)
| [deleted]
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| PDF splitting sites and DiffChecker.com are some of the best
| industrial espionage tools ever created.
| wetpaws wrote:
| I really like the concept of Preview on mac, but every time I try
| to do something simple in it for more than 10 seconds, I just
| sigh and install Krita.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I love using Preview to make icon backgrounds transparent and to
| invert black/white icons. The transparency tool for Preview is
| significantly better than the Instant Alpha in Keynote, IMO.
| cvak wrote:
| I love preview, but it has bugged comments/annotations in PDFs,
| which cost my like 1h of work last week, so, yeah, don't use it
| for that.
| Bigpet wrote:
| It has some even more fundamental bugs with PDF. Concatenating
| transformation matrices with negative scaling (i.e to flip the
| coordinate system you're drawing in) is completely broken in
| Preview and Safari. It's completely conformant according to the
| PDF standard.
|
| Obviously prints fine and chrome/firefox or Windows don't have
| any issues with it. Obviously Adobe has no issue with it.
|
| But here it is staying broken for years, because you can't
| explain to mac users that Apple is the one that made the
| mistake if they preview things your tool generates and they
| look broken. So devs just "fix" their PDFs to be bug compatible
| with Apples version.
| OJFord wrote:
| Preview is the one thing I miss from macOS (i.e. excluding
| hardware) using Linux. Unless I'm not allowed to include it's
| integration into Finder (or 'the file browser') as 'one thing',
| in which case that too.
| pschastain wrote:
| I used to use Preview.app extensively for work until it was
| rewritten & hobbled post-Mavericks. While it's still useful it
| lost a lot of functionality i.e. "smart" text insertion.
| knolan wrote:
| I love Preview. It was one of the reasons I switched to Mac back
| in 2010.
|
| Another fun feature since we're all sharing. This works across
| many native apps. Hold Option and drag to select a block of text.
| Handy for pulling numbers from a table.
| dantondwa wrote:
| Preview is amazing and I miss it very dearly, now that I'm not
| running macOS anymore. There's simply nothing like it anywhere
| else. The amount of things it can do, and what a sleek UI.
|
| I only suffered a bit during the El Capitan-Sierra era, as I
| think they rewrote the PDF engine and there were some
| regressions. Anyway, it's the best and I wish something like that
| existed elsewhere.
|
| On Linux, GNOME's pdf viewer could be close to it, but it is
| lacking all the annotation features except for highlights. KDE's
| Okular is a bit better, but it's UI is bad. On Windows, there's
| just nothing like it. I use Sumatra, but I miss Preview all the
| time.
| dry_soup wrote:
| The title would be much more clear with a comma after "Preview"
| IMO.
| dang wrote:
| A comma, added.
| yasoob wrote:
| Yes! I was wondering which app it is asking me to preview.
| These are the times when I wish HackerNews allowed OPs to edit
| post titles after submission.
| RaoulP wrote:
| Agreed. In this case the modified title was extra hard to
| parse because "Tips" is also an iOS app.
| simlevesque wrote:
| It isn't even fixed in the original blog post.
| Tarragon wrote:
| It's mentioned heavily in the article but I want to emphasize...
| Preview is the easiest way to slice up and merge PDF files.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Preview and Automator are a powerful duo.
|
| When applying for mortgages I needed a lot of paperwork and it
| was so nice being able to point Automator to a folder of pdfs
| and documents and quickly set up a little workflow that
| collated everything, then it opened the documents in Preview, I
| fixed a few minor tweaks, signed the forms, and sent them off.
| It felt like I had superpowers.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I have done exactly this - Automator is the other secret
| weapon in MacOSX's arsenal.
|
| Downloading a bunch of PDFs from my bank/broker into folder
| and then running an Automator script to combine them into a
| single PDF is the only satisfying part of collecting
| information for my tax return.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Yes this!
|
| I had to recently compile some documents for court, they were
| in several different PDF's and I did not necessarily want all
| of it. The ability to easily copy specific pages from one
| document into one large document. Made life so easy.
|
| There are so many small features in Preview that just makes it
| such an underrated tool
| nipponese wrote:
| The fact that people don't know about this sucks when the
| feature breaks. Around 2016 it was broken for a year and then
| after a year, just like that it was fixed.
| ollien wrote:
| This feature is one of the few things I miss dearly since
| moving to Linux as my daily-driver OS. There are command-line
| tools but nothing compares to Preview from what I've found.
| dorchadas wrote:
| I never realized how much I used it and relied on it until I
| moved to Windows over the winter break so I could game with
| friends. One of the many reasons my next computer is going to
| be another MacBook most likely. I really miss that thing.
| Jcowell wrote:
| It's why I have two computers. Mac for work , PC for
| gaming.
| deepspace wrote:
| My cross-platform goto for manipulating PDF pages is PDFsam:
| https://pdfsam.org/
| jeffbee wrote:
| https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger
| ollien wrote:
| Wow, this looks great! I'll have to give this a try later
| tonight.
| rumblestrut wrote:
| I use Preview daily. I definitely haven't forgotten about it.
| PrimeDirective wrote:
| All this, and yet you can't move forwards or backwards, when
| there are other files in the folder. I would be gladly wrong if
| someone could point out how to do this in Preview
| ask_b123 wrote:
| It seems like you can move to the next or previous file with
| tab + up/down arrow keys.
|
| I just found out by mashing all the buttons I could think of.
| :-)
| PrimeDirective wrote:
| This is not exactly it. What I meant was, something what
| IrfanView does: when you open an image (or any file the
| program can read), you can press a button to open the
| (alphabetically?) next or previous image in the same folder.
|
| Looks like Preview only has this, when you select all files
| and open them (Cmd+O). Wish it was like IrfanView.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I'm confused here , so like if you're in a folder with a
| file selected and hit the space bar , does pressing the
| arrow keys not preview the next file for you ?
| minimaxir wrote:
| The best use of Preview/Markup is _proper_ redaction of names for
| posting images to social media:
|
| 1. Set Shape Fill color
|
| 2. Set Shape Border color
|
| 3. Insert a Rectangle.
|
| The rectangle can then be moved/resized/copy/pasted to cover
| names precisely and won't inadvertently leak names like the
| spraypaint tool does.
| josho wrote:
| Be careful with that workflow. If you ever share the modified
| PDF that rectangle likely hasn't redacted anything.
|
| On a digital PDF the underlying text is still accessible, and
| even if the PDF was a scan, the original image likely hasn't
| been modified, instead a new shape layer was added.
| wtetzner wrote:
| I usually end up printing out the dead-tree version with the
| black rectangles, and scanning it back in, just to be sure
| the data under the black rectangles can't be retrieved.
| minimaxir wrote:
| True; to clarify this is for images, not PDFs.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Jcowell wrote:
| You don't even have to do this. Preview has a redaction
| feature. It's the 3rd option on the left.
| Maursault wrote:
| For such a simple application, Preview is very powerful.
| Generally I use pdftk to do things with pdfs. But Preview
| duplicates nearly all that functionality. Need to separate one
| page of a pdf into a new pdf document? Preview can do that. Need
| to join two pdfs? Preview can do that. Need to create a pdf that
| has some pages from another pdf, and some pages from yet another
| pdf, Preview can do that. Need to markup or sign a pdf? Preview
| excels at this.
|
| Windows has only third party pdf support, and almost every
| available option is inferior to Preview.
|
| The only software I know that is more advanced than Preview is
| Enfocus PitStop Pro. But that is for professional situations
| where you need low level control and editing of a pdf for
| whatever reason, such as correcting typos without the original
| document source format, or pdf processing and creation
| automation.
| kevinsundar wrote:
| People also forget that you can use Preview to scan documents
| from your scanner rather than using whatever shitty software came
| with yours.
|
| Also, Preview > File > Import from iPhone > Scan Documents gives
| you a virtual scanner instead of having to install one of those
| "scanner" apps on your phone. Its built into your iPhone already!
|
| I also use it frequently to change image file types.
|
| You can also make a digital version of your signature from a
| picture of physical version.
|
| There's just tons of small features that work well.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| For scanning there's also Image Capture.app which also comes
| with the OS. I haven't tried using it with the phone though,
| just a normal printer/scanner.
| haroldp wrote:
| I like Image Capture.app when I want to scan a multi-page
| document to one PDF
| kccqzy wrote:
| I've always used the built-in Image Capture app to do tjr
| scanning, mainly because the app seems to open automatically
| when I plug in my USB flatbed scanner.
| jdwithit wrote:
| Holy hell, I'm glad I clicked on this story. Had no idea this
| feature existed, I've been using much clunkier solutions to get
| a photo or document over from my phone. Thanks!
| apnsngr wrote:
| There is also the built in Image Capture app that works with
| most flatbed scanners or printer/scanner combos. It has its own
| quirks, but works better than any manufacturer software I've
| ever tried.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. Works out of the box with every Epson flatbed scanner
| I've attached.
| saagarjha wrote:
| The Scanner feature is actually PrinterProxy.app, rather than
| Preview.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| People probably forget that because the Preview UI is extremely
| minimalist, like it doesn't want to tell you about all its
| capabilities
| josephg wrote:
| If you want to scan a document and have an iphone handy, you
| can also right click in Finder and "Scan document... from
| iPhone". It opens a UI on your phone that I've never seen
| before, and "scans" (photographs) pages of a document.
|
| When you're done the results end up in a new PDF wherever you
| clicked.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Preview has other interactions with iOS and iPadOS, too. If
| you enter markup mode you can draw all over a PDF with your
| phone or tablet.
| wiredfool wrote:
| How do you trigger this? I'm not seeing it on Monterey +
| ios 15.4.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are some prerequisites like having the same icloud
| account signed in on both mac and iphone.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204975
| MawKKe wrote:
| That iOS scan feature is "hidden" in the Files app. Open it
| on your phone and press the three dots in the top right
| corner and it should have "scan documents" option.
|
| You can also select "black & white" mode for text documents
| which saves a ton of space
| leodriesch wrote:
| You can also add Notes to your control center in settings.
| You can then long press the notes icon in control center
| and choose "Scan document".
| jitl wrote:
| Notes.app also exposes scanning... but often I want to scan
| to camera roll. They should add a button in Camera.
| kevinsundar wrote:
| Ah I just added this to my comment as you were typing it up.
| I've used this feature a lot too. Works well.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Oh wow, I use iPhone Notes to scan documents when out and about
| quite often, but I had no idea Preview could connect to it.
| Thanks!
| rogual wrote:
| Preview is great. I miss it whenever I'm not on a Mac. Fast,
| light, useful, tasteful. I dread the day a design team remembers
| it exists and decides it's due for a "refresh".
| pikseladam wrote:
| awesome app
| PeterCorless wrote:
| I have no idea why the author says this is an "app people forget
| about." I use it constantly. Hundreds if not thousands of times a
| month. It is always open. It is my faithful companion. It flows
| through my bloodstream. I breathe and dream and gain my nutrients
| and sunlight via screenshots and edits in Preview.
| jitl wrote:
| Preview is one of those essential things that sets macOS apart
| from the other operating systems, and contributes to that "Mac
| has good UX" vibe. Last time I opened the Windows equivalent, it
| tried to sell me on Microsoft's PDF-alike format... and asked me
| to connect Office365.
|
| Another tiny macOS feature I love is that you can drop a file
| icon on any Open or Save dialog to select the file in the dialog.
| On other OSs, this moves the file to the directory shown in the
| dialog, or does nothing. On Windows, I install Listary to get the
| same features https://www.listary.com/
|
| There are so many other little macOS things that make it easier
| to work in the GUI - but on HN they're all overshadowed by the
| big "wow window management on Mac is 90s unless you install an
| app" issue, which makes me sad. I'm hoping that the post-Ive
| Apple - an Apple more comfortable with "pro" users and beauty in
| utility versus form - will try to fix that one... and bring back
| all the good Mission Control stuff from Snow Leopard (which IMO
| is the greatest OS ever released).
| brundolf wrote:
| I adore the fact that I can sign PDFs so easily from the
| system-default viewer (and save my signature for next time)
|
| Also love that I can do all the image-editing basics from the
| same app (enough to make memes anyway...)
|
| Though it does concern me a bit that most of the best UX
| features in Apple software are older; usually the newer an
| Apple UI is, the worse it is. Control Center and such are
| pretty nice I guess, but Apple Music on macOS is terrible
| wtetzner wrote:
| Yeah, PDFs on Windows are a pain. I've set Firefox as my
| default PDF reader on my Windows box.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Absolutely. I recently tried switching to Linux, and realized
| how amazing Preview is. Tasks like "swap 2 pages in a PDF" or
| "crop this image" are much less intuitive and often require you
| to install a single-purpose command line utility, or fire up
| something like GIMP which has a steeper learning curve and
| feels like overkill
| solarkraft wrote:
| > On other OSs, this moves the file to the directory shown in
| the dialog, or does nothing
|
| Apps on Linux (Gnome?) do it too.
| jitl wrote:
| Nice! The last time I used Gnome/Ubuntu as my daily driver
| (2019?) that wasn't the case -- or maybe wasn't consistently
| the case.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think it makes more sense than opening the file - you are
| looking at a place in the filesystem after all.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Another great related feature is how easy it is to "print" to
| Preview and save as PDF. It makes it very easy to save copies
| of confirmations, payment receipts, etc when sites don't
| provide a PDF link.
|
| If you haven't tried it, make sure you are printing using the
| system dialog, and select "Open in Preview" in the drop-down
| list in the lower-left corner.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Another great related feature is how easy it is to "print"
| to Preview and save as PDF.
|
| It's an OS-wide feature. _Any_ application can print to PDF
| without specific support from that app.
| astrange wrote:
| Well, you need specific support if you have custom views or
| views that draw bitmap images, otherwise it won't look
| great.
| kergonath wrote:
| But then it won't look good in print either, right? The
| pdf is just a file with what would have otherwise gone to
| the printer.
| Anechoic wrote:
| _Another great related feature is how easy it is to "print"
| to Preview_
|
| BTW, if you are trying to save a protected PDF from Adobe
| reader that won't let you save it in an unprotected format
| that's compatible with Preview, there is "print" document
| trick you can try since Adobe Reader blocks the system print
| dialog: pause the queue for your printer (if you don't have a
| printer, just "install" a network postscript printer), and
| print the document. The document is then saved to a non-
| secured temp PDF file in /var/spool/cups, to a filename
| starting with "d" (ls -l -t to find the most recent file).
| That file is normally deleted after being sent to the
| printer, but my pausing the print queue, the file is there
| long enough to copy somewhere. Rename the document, and
| you're good to go.
|
| This is a trick from the Mac OS X Hints days, and still
| works, as of at least Catalina.
| bigtex wrote:
| I think that has been a standard feature since at least OS X
| 10.2.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yes, when Apple bought NeXT (I know, more like the other
| way around) they wanted the graphics model to follow
| something akin to NeXT's -- which was based around Display
| Postscript. The modern equivalent was of course PDF.
|
| If you could render into a PDF context with your graphics
| engine (CoreGraphics) you would have a near print-ready
| document. (You still need to pass along additional info
| regarding whether to print duplex, number of copies, etc.)
|
| So anyway, Save to PDF, Open in Preview were basically
| free.
| [deleted]
| jfk13 wrote:
| Or instead of "Open in Preview" (and then save it somewhere
| from Preview.app), you can directly use "Save to Web
| Receipts" from the Print dialog.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Is there any reason it took so long for Microsoft to include
| print to PDF in Windows other than bad management?
| dchest wrote:
| I believe this was due to Adobe threatening them with a
| lawsuit https://betanews.com/2006/06/02/adobe-to-sue-
| microsoft-for-p...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| According to the article, Adobe helped Apple? But
| threatened to sue Microsoft? I wonder what the details
| are.
|
| >However, Adobe has freely offered the specifications on
| PDF to other companies. Apple's Mac OS X operating system
| has built in support for reading and saving of PDF files.
| lostlogin wrote:
| My passport application photo kept getting rejected as my eyes
| were 'too dark'.
|
| I tried various things without luck, then in a rage, I copied
| my 'light' eye and stuck it over my shaded eye.
|
| I thought the passport photo submission tool would let me
| review before accepting an upload. Nope, off it went.
|
| The passport has worked in several countries, USA, UK and
| others.
|
| Thanks Preview.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Ancient companies requiring I print out a form, sign it
| physically, scan it, send it back... I just open it in
| Preview, use the text annotation tool and some random cursive
| font, "sign it", re-export, done. I haven't owned a printer
| or scanner in 10 years.
| luhn wrote:
| It has a feature now where you can scan your signature and
| pop it into any document on demand. Super useful.
| maxwelldone wrote:
| This is my wish list for preview:
|
| 1. Support for h265 video previews (not sure about technical or
| any other licensing hurdles)
|
| 2. Basic playback controls (via keyboard) when viewing video
| previews - just play, pause, skip would do. I review a ton of
| videos and I'd often like to pause to take a screenshot or skip
| to quickly see what's happening in the video.
|
| 3. Option to zoom on text files like json, csv etc. Not a big
| deal but would be a great addition especially on hi-res
| external displays.
|
| Edit: Looks like I mixed quicklook with preview. My bad.
| kergonath wrote:
| Quick Look does this, does it not?
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'm curious why QuickTime Player is not what you want?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > _Another tiny macOS feature I love is that you can drop a
| file icon on any Open or Save dialog to select the file in the
| dialog. On other OSs, this moves the file to the directory
| shown in the dialog, or does nothing._
|
| The reason other OS's don't support that macOS feature is
| because their open and save dialogue is usable on its own. In
| my opinion the open and save dialogue is one of the worst
| designed interfaces on macOS (and easily the worst open and
| save dialogue across all of the popular desktop environments).
| The fact that it's "killer feature" is having to use _another_
| file navigator to find the target and then drag that file into
| the first dialogue (ie dialogue that should have been used to
| find the file to begin with) is more damning than anything.
|
| If there were two things I wish Apple would add in macOS, it
| is:
|
| 1. draggable hotspots (like in Windows and KDE)
|
| 2. a completely redesigned open and save dialogue that works a
| little more like Windows and KDE
|
| I can live (and even like some of) macOS's idiosyncrasies. But
| those two irritate the hell out of me on an almost daily basis.
| adrusi wrote:
| The macOS open/save dialog is almost identical to the Finder
| UI, what would you change about it? The reason it's helpful
| to be able to drag a file from somewhere else into the
| open/save dialog is that you often already have the file open
| somewhere. A common workflow: navigate to a document in
| finder, edit it in some app, save it, upload it to a web
| form. Similarly if you have a path to the file handy
| somewhere, you can hit [?]|G and paste it.
|
| And while I can see how reasonable people can disagree about
| the virtues of Mac/Windows/KDE open/save dialogs, Gnome
| definitely has the worst. Personally my KDE experience is
| limited, but of the other three I prefer macOS by a wide
| margin.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I almost never have Finder open. I usually think "I want to
| create a spreadsheet" so I'll open Excel and then look for
| the document. Or I'll be doing some dev work so I'll
| navigate there in the terminal and then open code via `code
| .`
|
| I think some of that habit might have stemmed from the fact
| that I don't like Finder much. I don't like the hotkeys (eg
| [ENTER] to rename), I don't like it's layout. As much as I
| disliked Microsoft's "lets turn explorer.exe into Internet
| Explorer", the editable address bar is actually really nice
| (you can see precisely where you are and quickly change it
| to where you want to be).
|
| I'd say Dolphin (KDE) is probably the perfect file manager
| for me. It's got a terminal baked in (which automatically
| changes directories when you navigate in the GUI) so you
| can mix and match GUI and CLI operations. You can add tabs
| so your file manager can be used as a session (eg if you're
| working in multiple directories for a specific task or
| project, you can have one file manager instance open for
| that task but different tabs per directory). There's so
| much I love about it. But it's also the polar opposite of
| Finder, which might explain why I don't like Finder much.
|
| I do completely agree with you about Gnome though.
| vvillena wrote:
| This is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. It could be
| said that other OSs had to add lots of file management
| features to their file selector dialog because relying on
| drag-and-drop from another application was unfeasible.
| saagarjha wrote:
| What do you not like about the existing dialog?
| drcongo wrote:
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I hate Windows! Just because I happen to think specific
| UI elements are better than macOS it doesn't mean I
| prefer Windows as a platform. In fact I consider such
| opinions as being more objective than the "apple can do
| no wrong" fanboyism that often gets posted.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Navigating is a pain. eg you cannot navigate to any
| "hidden" directories and cannot you type paths in the
| "address bar" nor the file name input selector.
|
| There's a few other little annoyances but I can't recall
| them right now (currently awaiting delivery of a new
| MacBook Pro so I'm back to running Linux for the time
| being).
|
| The dialogue annoys me enough that I've just gotten into
| the habit of opening everything from the command line
| instead. In fact Finder is pretty poor for those things too
| (I've lost count of the amount of times I've ran `open .`
| to launch Finder in the path I want rather than navigating
| there via the GUI). But at least Finder does 90+% of what I
| want, even if I do have to turn to the command line a lot.
| Whereas I find the open dialogue to be almost completely
| useless.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| You can just start typing to go to a folder. E.G. type
| "/tmp|" will move the panel to that directory
| jitl wrote:
| - Cmd-Shift-G opens a fuzzy complete path input
|
| - "Show hidden files" is a preference you can change.
|
| Once you're comfortable with the CLI and know the paths
| you care about for a task, in what cases do you prefer a
| GUI open dialog on other systems?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > _Cmd-Shift-G opens a fuzzy complete path input_
|
| The problem is that's not going to be an easy thing to
| remember. It's not an obvious hotkey and nor is it even
| memorable that the hotkey even exists. There's no UI
| hints that it does. And when you use hundreds of
| different pieces of software every day, from CLI tools to
| complicated desktop applications, there's no way anyone
| can remember every single hotkey and flag for them. This
| is why tools like fzf and sophisticated shell auto-
| completion exist. They've at least recognised that this
| stuff needs to be discoverable somehow.
|
| In fact that is my biggest annoyance with Apple's UIs.
| There's so much hidden functionality that is almost
| impossible to discover (and a lot of it is incredibly
| easy to forget again too). For example I was using an
| iPhone for years before I discovered you could move the
| caret by long pressing on the space bar. Before then I
| was cursing how much easier it was to edit text in
| Android because I just assumed there wasn't a precise way
| to move the caret in iOS. I felt like such an idiot that
| it took an internet meme to teach me to use my
| phone...but then I remember that it shouldn't have taken
| a meme to make people aware that feature existed.
|
| > _" Show hidden files" is a preference you can change._
|
| I don't want to change a preference. I want to be able to
| view hidden files on demand. Most of the time hidden
| files are better off hidden. That's actually an example
| of sensible defaults. However it's also useful to be able
| to toggle them on from the open dialogue when needed.
|
| > _Once you're comfortable with the CLI and know the
| paths you care about for a task, in what cases do you
| prefer a GUI open dialog on other systems?_
|
| It's the other way around, I grew up on text only systems
| and had to learn to adapt to GUIs. I still struggle with
| them even now (which is why I hate it when you're
| expected to stumble upon functionality by chance).
|
| As for when I prefer to use the GUI open dialogue? It's
| when I'm already using the GUI for something. Like
| emails, spreadsheets, word processing. Boring stuff we
| all wish we didn't have to do but cannot escape
| completely. I'd rather not have to context switch away
| from the GUI and back into iTerm just to open a file.
| rovolo wrote:
| > The problem is that's not going to be an easy thing to
| remember.
|
| 'G' for "Go to folder". cmd-G is standardized as "Find
| Next" across apps, so you add "shift" to do an app-
| specific behavior.
|
| > I want to be able to view hidden files on demand.
|
| cmd-shift-'.' . The '.' matches the prefix for auto-
| hidden files.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I gotta say, for all of my (many, many) criticisms of macOS
| the save dialog seems fine to me. I almost always have the
| destination folder already open in Finder, if anything the
| improvement would be to put a list of Finder's open folders
| into the save dialog. Dragging it over works ok though.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| A list of open Finder windows in the sidebar would indeed
| be lovely.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Not quite that, but macOS' new tabs-in-windows is close.
| I personally don't love keeping them all in tabs in a
| single window, but I can always select the Window > Merge
| All Windows option to gather all my disparate Finder
| windows together for this purpose.
|
| (ETA: This wouldn't work in the save dialog though, I
| missed that detail)
| kergonath wrote:
| > The reason other OS's don't support that macOS feature is
| because their open and save dialogue is usable on its own. In
| my opinion the open and save dialogue is one of the worst
| designed interfaces on macOS (and easily the worst open and
| save dialogue across all of the popular desktop
| environments). The fact that it's "killer feature" is having
| to use another file navigator to find the target and then
| drag that file into the first dialogue (ie dialogue that
| should have been used to find the file to begin with) is more
| damning than anything.
|
| It is not a browser, or a file manager. It is a file
| selector. So it allows you to select files, not do some file
| management. It is not rocket science. I get bitten at least a
| couple of times a week on Windows when I stupidly drag and
| drop the file I want to open, and instead of the sensible
| behaviour it gets just moved to whatever the app thought the
| default directory should be for its open file dialogs.
|
| > a completely redesigned open and save dialogue that works a
| little more like Windows and KDE
|
| Hell, no! Let me double that: hell _fucking_ no.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > _It is not a browser, or a file manager. It is a file
| selector._
|
| But you're selecting the file in a file manager and then
| dragging it into your "file selector". That whole dialogue
| then becomes completely redundant because you might as well
| just drag that file into the application window without
| having to click "open".
|
| > _I get bitten at least a couple of times a week on
| Windows when I stupidly drag and drop the file I want to
| open_
|
| If you drag the file into the text area it will work as you
| wish. Or you could just drag the file into the application
| -- a lot of applications will support that and open the
| file without displaying the file open dialogue.
| SllX wrote:
| It's a shortcut that comes in handy when you operate in
| deep file hierarchies and can't be bothered to memorize
| the path.
|
| That said there's even easier ways to get there:
|
| Just navigate, the sidebar will reflect what's in your
| Finder sidebar so you can use that as a shelf if you're
| going into one specific directory a lot for your work.
| It's a dynamic environment, you don't have to treat it
| like it's static.
|
| Or: hit Command-Shift-G. This will allow you to type the
| path with tab completion.
|
| Dragging the folder in is for when you're operating in
| the Finder _and_ another application and rather than
| navigating you want to just drag the proxy in to go right
| there. It's a shortcut, but depending on the task it's
| not necessarily the most efficient way to do it.
| adrusi wrote:
| Sometimes the application doesn't open files you drag
| onto its windows, and sometimes you want to select a file
| but not open it.
| kergonath wrote:
| > But you're selecting the file in a file manager and
| then dragging it into your "file selector". That whole
| dialogue then becomes completely redundant because you
| might as well just drag that file into the application
| window without having to click "open".
|
| Sometimes. Others the dialog is how you set things like
| the format of the file or some import options. Or you
| need a multiple selection and dropping a bunch of files
| just opens them separately. Sometimes you can input a
| regex and you just need to quickly go to the right
| directory. Sometimes you need to select a file to import
| it into another document and not open it. It is also damn
| convenient to just drop the folder where you want a new
| file to be in a "save as" dialog without having to
| navigate from dog knows where. There are plenty of use
| cases.
|
| What is redundant is a file manager in an import dialog.
| There is a full blown file manager that's always going to
| be better just a click away.
|
| > If you drag the file into the text area it will work as
| you wish.
|
| In theory, yes. In practice it's hit and miss as
| developers don't seem to care about using native widgets
| (that, and the fact that native widgets have vastly
| different capabilities on Windows thanks to years of
| cruft they cannot remove).
|
| [edit] sorry if it sounded harsh; I have nothing against
| you. It's just that the file selection dialogs are a
| particular pain point on Windows and Linux.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > _Sometimes_
|
| None of that prevents Apple from building a more
| featureful dialogue
|
| > _In theory, yes. In practice it's hit and miss as
| developers don't seem to care about using native widgets
| (that, and the fact that native widgets have vastly
| different capabilities on Windows thanks to years of
| cruft they cannot remove)._
|
| I agree it sucks when developers roll their own but
| that's not really relevant because we are comparing two
| very specific dialogues and not the wider OS ecosystem.
| (I'd use macOS over Windows any day of the week. But that
| doesn't mean I have to love everything about macOS).
|
| > _sorry if it sounded harsh_
|
| You didn't and we are good :) It's been really
| interesting hearing another viewpoint.
|
| > _It's just that the file selection dialogs are a
| particular pain point on Windows and Linux._
|
| For you. :) Personally I think KDE got it just about
| perfect.
|
| I guess this just goes to show how completely different
| two peoples preferences can be.
| matwood wrote:
| Preview is great. Among the many other features, it's also what
| I use to sign PDFs. You can enter and save a signature using
| the trackpad or camera and then paste it into any PDF. It looks
| like you printed, signed, and scanned the PDF back in.
| Matl wrote:
| > Preview is one of those essential things that sets macOS
| apart from the other operating systems
|
| KDE's Okukar is pretty similar imo.
| 0898 wrote:
| I worry that not enough people are aware of these little
| touches, and that one day they'll disappear.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I can't stand when I have to deal with a PDF on Windows on my
| office computer where I have the free copy of Acrobat.
|
| You can right click on a page and it's got "rotate" buttons up
| at the top. But when you click on one, it takes a second to
| think about it and then opens a popup to offer you a free 7-day
| trial of the Pro version. Rotating a page is too powerful a
| feature for Adobe to not try and sell it to you.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/oAYOoqG
|
| What you _can_ do is "Rotate View Clockwise" three times, way
| down at the bottom of the menu. It applies to the entire
| document instead of a single page, and it doesn't persist next
| time you open the file. Works in a pinch but it's deliberately
| shitty.
|
| Microsoft even had their own PDF viewing software with Windows
| 8, but instead of improving it to get their user experience one
| step closer to Apple's, they killed it off to make more people
| launch Edge by accident.
|
| I can only assume there's a KPI somewhere in Microsoft HQ
| tracking how many times Edge is launched, and making that graph
| go up and to the right has become their number one corporate
| priority.
|
| It would explain the taskbar's search screen, the "news and
| weather" bullshit, pressing F1 in Explorer opening a Bing
| search for "How to get help in Windows" instead of just giving
| you help, and most every other design choice they've made in
| the last couple of years.
| GraphenePants wrote:
| Correct, you get what you pay for. Acrobat Pro supports
| advanced rotations for only $14.99 per month.
|
| https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pricing.html
| eadmund wrote:
| > Acrobat Pro supports advanced rotations for only $14.99
| per month.
|
| That right there is a peak-2022 quote, alright!
| abawany wrote:
| I recommend trying SumatraPDF - it also supports epub.
| samstave wrote:
| What I hate about software like PDF viewers is that they are
| akin to:
|
| Here I printed your manuscript, but in order to read it, you
| need to pay me for these special glasses to see the ink.
|
| Oh you want a change? Pay me for these special gloves so you
| may handle the pages and reorganize them as you like.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Agreed, on a Mac I feel like a PDF document is a stack of
| paper that I can rearrange, copy, rotate, and otherwise
| handle however I want to.
|
| On Windows it's more like a hardcover bound book that I can
| download and attach to an email to share with someone, but
| god forbid I want to change anything.
|
| They can make me use Windows in the office, but next time
| something dies in my home PC I'm just going to sell the
| rest of it for parts and replace it with a Steam Deck.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if Preview being so much easier than
| Acrobat isn't an intentional poke at Adobe for all the
| times Adobe strayed from the one true path of Apple. That
| whole skipping a version of software release because
| Adobe didn't pay attention to words from up on high to
| quite using deprecated language surely didn't sit well.
| samstave wrote:
| Adobe is the result of a parade of gifted artists who
| fell into a tar-pit of developers who are all clamoring
| to design a ladder that will functionaly get them out of
| the tar-pit, while making them look like they came out on
| top! as _' the _best_ art-eeeests who can teach you how
| to get out of a tar-pit'_, and (nevermind them... they
| are just idiot developers in a tar-pit) [PAY ME MONEY]
|
| --
|
| [The artists fell into a tar-pit of not knowing software
| dev SLDC blah blah...
|
| They came out with a wonderful thing
|
| $$
|
| figured out iteration in software...
|
| experienced market desire to want product vs market
| wanting to pay....
|
| PIRACY
|
| DRM?? Hurry up...
|
| PIRACY LuLz ensue
|
| --
|
| Figma? and others (figma and others started as a PS repl)
|
| --
|
| yeah...
|
| AI (the stupidly awesome kind, not Musk's jewish space
| lazer bots)
|
| Adobe has so many awesome stories in the history of
| cmputing.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| It originated on NeXTStep which used Display Postscript.
|
| The graphics primitives still apply to macOS.
| samstave wrote:
| samstave wrote:
| GEE... Are disney and Apple so diff???
|
| Oh - wait, Jobs wanted to be just as much a [name that
| thing] that walt was.
|
| Psychopath recognize psychopath in the psycho-ward...
|
| Along with all the Stockholm bitches... (deniers welcome,
| although they can't refute)
| layer8 wrote:
| You can use the Adobe Reader Classic Track, which is still on
| the feature level of 2020 and allows counterclockwise
| rotation: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-
| docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNo...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case. All I have is
| "rotate clockwise" and it's just like Reader DC in that it
| rotates the view of the entire document rather than
| actually rotating a page.
|
| It's missing the rotation arrow buttons that bug you to buy
| a subscription, so that's a bit nicer than the current
| Reader DC release. I assume this is just because it lags
| behind the main release and they'll be rolled in as a
| future update on the Classic track?
| layer8 wrote:
| View > Show/Hide > Toolbar Items > Show Page Display
| Tools > Counterclockwise
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Yes, that rotates your view of every page in the
| document. It can't rotate a page independently and even
| if you wanted to rotate every page you can't save the
| change back to the PDF file because it's functionally
| "rotate view" even though they hadn't renamed it that yet
| in 2020.
|
| Appreciate the attempt to help, but Acrobat Reader is
| just shitty.
|
| I know it's a deliberate choice to be useless in pursuit
| of selling more subscriptions, but it's hard to cut them
| a lot of slack for having a worse free PDF tool than what
| Apple was shipping for free on all their computers more
| than 20 years ago.
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, Adobe Reader is a viewer, not an editor (that's
| Adobe Acrobat). For light editing like rotating pages I'd
| recommend the free version of PDF-XChange Editor:
| https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-
| editor (Persistent rotation is on the "Organize" tab.)
|
| It's easy for Apple because they don't sell a competing
| product. Adobe has to balance providing a useful free
| viewer against a paid editor (or payed extra functions).
| There's certainly a lot I'd like to see improved/included
| in Adobe Reader, but I also recognize that they are in a
| different market position than Apple.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| If someone hands me a stack of papers to read and half of
| the pages are upside down, I consider orienting the pages
| so they all have the text right-side-up to be part of
| reading it. I understand Adobe doesn't have hardware
| sales to prop up their software but I think it's pretty
| unreasonable to charge $15/month to rotate pages within a
| document.
|
| They do let you fill in forms and comment in the free
| version, even though that's not strictly speaking under
| the definition of "reading".
|
| I'm currently rotating pages by sending them to my iPad
| and using Documents by Readdle. Not sure if that's part
| of the free features or because I bought their PDF Expert
| and some of the PDF editing capability gets shared across
| apps.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not going to argue about that particular
| feature -- I mean Adobe Reader _does_ allow you to rotate
| the page display for viewing purposes, just not in the
| way you 'd prefer -- but the broader perspective is that
| Adobe roughly differentiates between authoring a document
| and using a document -- authoring is what costs money.
| Form fill-in is not authoring, and under the hood it's
| actually more similar to commenting/highlighting (adding
| stuff "on top" of the normal page content), which are
| also reader/viewer functions.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| So my real problem here is the disconnect between Adobe's
| "rotate view clockwise" being a document-wide operation,
| and the fact that actual PDF documents don't have
| consistent page orientation throughout.
|
| It's usually that all of the pages are consistently
| oriented as portrait, but some of them actually have
| landscape content.
|
| The incorrect portrait page orientation was probably done
| on purpose to keep printers from screwing it up, and
| rotating a piece of paper to look at it barely requires a
| thought. No big deal if you're printing it.
|
| But the ease of looking at a single page sideways and
| then going back to the original rotation doesn't map to
| reading it on a computer screen with document-wide rotate
| commands, and they really should've sucked it up and let
| me fix individual pages. Even if it's a temporary "view"
| change and not something I can save back to the file.
| timeon wrote:
| Comparing to Preview, just opening Acrobat is pain.
| [deleted]
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > I'm hoping that the post-Ive Apple - an Apple more
| comfortable with "pro" users and beauty in utility versus form
| - will try to fix that one... and bring back all the good
| Mission Control stuff from Snow Leopard (which IMO is the
| greatest OS ever released).
|
| I wouldn't hold my breath. They've been gradually hiding
| controls behind buttons and popovers. The proxy icon (folder or
| document icon in the title bar of a window) was hidden by
| default in I believe Big Sur. There's a `defaults` command to
| make it visible at all times in Monterey, but hiding it is a
| foolish design choice on Apple's part.
|
| Look at the debacle with Safari last year. The software is form
| over function for the last few years.
|
| I can't remember the name of the guy everyone blames for this,
| but he talks about minimalism and reducing app UI in favor of
| putting content forward during OS feature reveals. The approach
| is completely backwards, imo.
|
| BTW: thanks for the tip about Listary. I'll check it out.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I worked on the Preview app for a number of years during a
| time when the app more or less flew under the radar. It was
| easy then to simply add features that "we" wanted as users of
| the app.
|
| At that time, the design team was less interested in Preview,
| more interested in Mail and Safari (of course). Design would
| come in and maybe tell us to put the thumbnail drawer on the
| right vs. the left.
|
| Honestly, I think the design team found Preview useful as
| well and didn't stand in our way when we wanted to add
| "instant alpha" or simple annotations.....
| dschuessler wrote:
| I love HN for tech discussions in which the actual people
| involved pop up. Thank you for that great piece of software
| you worked on.
|
| Out of curiosity, was there a team exclusively dedicated to
| the Preview app? How autonomous were you in deciding how to
| improve the application?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| At first Preview landed in my lap exclusively. Someone
| had shimmed in some code to open Quicktime image types
| that NSImage (NeXTStep, AppKit) did not recognize --
| "BMP" just as an example.
|
| I was told, "Hey, we have a rich PDF API/SPI in
| CoreGraphics (Quartz2D) maybe you can beef up our PDF
| support in Preview."
|
| PDF at that time was quickly rasterized (by AppKit) and
| really treated no differently than, say, a multi-page
| TIFF file in Preview.
|
| As I started to switch over to rendering PDF's using
| CoreGraphics rather than NSImage, another engineer
| (Werner) took over the image side of Preview.
|
| For a while then it was a team of two -- me and Werner.
| Werner did the image side (but also owned and had
| responsibility for ImageIO) and I did the PDF side (I
| eventually wrote PDFKit but also had things like the
| Displays Prefs pane, some Color Sync stuff as my other
| responsibilities as well).
|
| Werner is smarter than me though so where there were
| shared resources in Preview (like the toolbar, for
| example) often Werner handled that.
|
| What I gave above is more or less the direction we were
| given -- so there was a good deal of autonomy. I think
| everyone sort of had their hands full just trying to get
| a new graphics system up and running and to move
| functionality over from System 9 to OS X such that Werner
| and I were free to just add the stuff we wanted.
|
| Initially I think we tried to keep some commonality -- if
| images could be rotated, I would try to also rotate PDFs.
| Image zoom in/out? PDF zoom in/out.
|
| But when I added text handling (text selection, search)
| we kind of acknowledged that the two really were separate
| beasts. I was surprised later though when the same
| annotations I had added to support PDF also were added as
| mark-up tools to images (I was no longer on the team then
| as I recall).
|
| Preview eventually went to its own team though and the
| engineers working on it did not have other
| duties/distractions like Werner and I. This is when
| signatures, instant-alpha, and other niceties were added.
|
| I definitely enjoyed the years Werner and I were on it
| and we could just add "cool stuff" we wanted. I remember
| someone asking for the "blank page" feature -- where you
| can insert a blank page into a PDF - it allows you to
| play with even/oddness (front/backedness) of pages when
| printing 2-up. It was cool so we added it.
|
| I like to point out that "we" were the users of the app
| as much (or more so) than some manager up the chain. To
| that end, I always felt we more or less knew what users
| wanted.
|
| I think eventually the designers came to use Preview
| quite a bit and so had their own suggestions but they
| certainly weren't standing in our way early on.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > There's a `defaults` command to make it visible at all
| times in Monterey, but hiding it is a foolish design choice
| on Apple's part.
|
| It's also a setting under Accessibility > Display > Show
| window title icons, so there's little danger of it
| disappearing since it's not a hidden setting.
| jen20 wrote:
| You can also hover over the title to get the proxy to
| appear.
| 333c wrote:
| > I can't remember the name of the guy everyone blames for
| this, but he talks about minimalism and reducing app UI in
| favor of putting content forward during OS feature reveals
|
| I believe you might be referring to Jony Ive (who is named in
| the portion you quoted). He left Apple a few years ago, which
| is what the comment you quote is talking about.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| If Mac OS spent two OS update cycles just fixing the usability
| kinks that plague window management, context switching across
| apps, mouse support, multi desktop support, and finder, then it
| would be the most pleasurable OS to work with out of the 3. As
| it is, these flaws make up most of the interactions I have with
| an OS moment to moment, and as a result Mac OS frustrates me in
| ways Windows and Linux (using Pop OS with Gnome) don't.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I love preview and this post covers a number of cool features but
| I can't help but be extremely frustrated by not only getting a
| (presumably) newsletter signup without any interaction but also
| the sheer gall to pop this [0] without a single bit of
| information as to what you are signing up for. Not title, no
| description, just "Give us your name and email". I hate these
| popups to begin with but this takes the cake.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/kDis8Yo
| junglistguy wrote:
| Still don't know how to preview all photos in for example
| "downloads"
|
| Osx UX is a messsssss
| js2 wrote:
| You have quite a few options. Switch to Icon view and enlarge
| the icons, switch to Gallery View, or use Quicklook:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201732
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-view-options...
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/view-and-edit-files...
| nicky0 wrote:
| Select them in finder and press space bar.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Have you tried switching that folder to "Gallery" view? It
| display a list of all images and then a large preview along
| with an info panel to the right. Seems like it should give you
| everything you need. You can then switch back to your normal
| view when done so it doesn't mess up how your folder is setup.
|
| https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/m...
| junglistguy wrote:
| I need list view, and proper preview... Gallery its not an
| option
| Tagbert wrote:
| Then why not use List View with Preview turned on? What
| makes a "proper" preview?
| jitl wrote:
| How I would do it is go to Downloads in Finder (Command shift
| g), filter file type to images, select the first one (down
| arrow), and press spacebar to open in Quick Look, and just use
| arrow keys to move around - no need to open an app at all for
| quick viewing. If I did want to use Preview to view all the
| files, select them (eg shift down arrow) and drop on the
| Preview icon.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The Finder can do this pretty easily.
|
| 1. Open the downloads folder
|
| 2. view>as icons
|
| 3. view>use groups, view>group by>kind
|
| 4. scroll down to the images section, hit the 'show all' at the
| top right of this section
|
| 5. drag the icon size slider at the lower right to make icons
| huge, scroll around
|
| Alternatively
|
| 1. open the downloads folder
|
| 2. view>as list/column
|
| 3. view>use groups, view>group by>kind
|
| 4. scroll down to the images section
|
| 5. select an image, hit space to bring up Quick Look, use
| up/down arrows to move through the images
|
| You can use Quick Look from the icon view too but it's a bit
| confusing to try and navigate through a 2d grid that's hidden
| behind the Quick Look.
|
| You could also use either of these methods to isolate all the
| images quickly, then select them and open them with Preview if
| you explicitly wanted them in that app, but big icons/Quick
| Look is usually gonna be a lot faster for uses like "finding
| that one image in a messy directory".
| junglistguy wrote:
| If you consider five points to be "very easy"...
|
| I need a simple solution. Someone below said how to do it in
| windows - doublecqick first photo. DONE
| knolan wrote:
| In fairness you're being really obtuse and not explaining
| what you want clearly. You refuse to change the way Finder
| shows pictures. Double clicking (or CMD o) will show the
| photos in Preview just like Windows. Tapping Space will
| show them in Quick Look.
|
| What more do you want?
| jhasse wrote:
| 1. Install Windows 2. Double-click the first image
| junglistguy wrote:
| hahah yes. i came from windows... :) Inned just that.
|
| All this finder-thing is damned
| [deleted]
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| How can I find the image I'm looking for in a folder of
| 100+? On Mac it's just Spacebar + down arrow until you find
| it. If you're aware of a way to do this on Windows without
| installing anything you'll be a lifesaver.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Sort Downloads by Kind. Select the group of photos. Double
| click. They will all be opened in one Preview window and you
| can scroll through all the photos.
|
| Or, select the first, touch the space bar and you will see the
| Quick Look preview. Use the arrow keys to move between the
| different files.
|
| Not really seeing the messssss, but to each their own I guess.
| jhasse wrote:
| > Select the group of photos.
|
| Not that easy depending on the number of pictures and the
| folder content.
|
| > Use the arrow keys to move between the different files.
|
| Won't work correctly in grid view.
|
| Also: I don't want to mess with the way I set up Finder to
| display/sort the folder just to view the pictures.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Create Smart Folders and sort by date, type, location,
| etc... Whatever you want. Then open the folder. You can
| tell Finder to use View as Gallery in those folders.
|
| You can also just continue to use Grid view and tell Finder
| to use large preview icons in that folder.
| junglistguy wrote:
| Not an option, i have list, and by date. Tons of files. No
| proper viewer
| [deleted]
| knolan wrote:
| Use Quick Look. Simply press Space to instantly preview almost
| any file you've highlighted in Finder. You can use the arrow
| keys to move to the next file in the finder window below. For
| multiple files selected you get a film strip in Quick Look.
|
| Lots of extra options are surfaced in MacOS when Option is
| held. Press option while any menu is open and you'll see new
| options. The context menu will show that quick look becomes
| full screen preview in this case. Lo and behold simply pressing
| Option Space will do the same thing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Just import it to Photos and send all of your images to SQLite
| hell!
| lostlogin wrote:
| Select them then open them? Or select, right click, open with.
|
| I suspect I'm missing your point somehow?
| jhasse wrote:
| The thing is, that "selecting them" might not be that easy
| depending on the number of files and how the content of the
| folder is sortes.
|
| On Windows/Linux you would just open the first file which is
| a lot easier.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I agree that Preview is a great tool and still use it for images,
| but I grew out of it when I needed to edit PDF content and
| outlines.
|
| I use PDF Expert instead which is available at a reasonable price
| (I got mine for $20, look around for a deal) and it's made by
| Ukrainians to boot. That was 4 years ago and they've yet to have
| a paid upgrade.
|
| It especially has effective search and replace. Everything else I
| tried would choke when trying to delete several hundreds bits of
| text from a PDF.
| bgorman wrote:
| What are features preview has that Okular and Evince are missing?
|
| In my opinion all three apps are worlds better than Acrobat, but
| I am not sure about the differences between the three.
| herodotus wrote:
| I really enjoyed working with the Preview team before I retired
| from Apple. My small group created a private framework that added
| "document reconstruction" to PDF documents: basically an inferred
| DOM based on whatever information (mainly geometric) we could use
| in the PDF document.
|
| Our moment of fame game at WWDC 2009, when Bertrand Serlet talked
| about Snow Leopard during the Keynote. At around the 5:10 mark he
| talks about performance improvements to Preview. He then goes on
| to say "There are also lots of little touches. The one I like is
| about text selection in PDF files. .... In Snow Leopard, we have
| used a little bit of AI to infer the structure of the
| document...." (He then demonstrates intelligent selection across
| columns) [Applause from the audience].
| (https://youtu.be/FTfChHwGFf0?t=306)
|
| My colleague and I presented the proposal to add this "little bit
| of AI" to a small group from the Graphics and Imaging department.
| Bertrand was in attendance, and it was thanks to him that we
| joined G&I. They were a fantastic team to work with!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, I know you. (And I retired just this last year, FWIW.)
| herodotus wrote:
| It was fun, wasn't it? I am thinking of driving down some
| time this summer. Hope to see you!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm in Nebraska now -- back in the midwest. I miss it
| though. I'll pop out this year again too but I suspect I'll
| miss you.
| vestrigi wrote:
| Have you by chance written a blog post or another HN comment
| about this? I think I heard that story before with some more
| detail :)
| kergonath wrote:
| Thank you very much for this feature, which I have used
| regularly for quite some years! That was one of the thousands
| of details that make Preview vastly better than most PDF
| viewers I have used.
| [deleted]
| diegof79 wrote:
| Thanks for creating that feature. It's very helpful to
| highlight and copy notes from multi-column papers!
|
| As others said in this thread... Preview is the best macOS
| built in app.
| spookybones wrote:
| Preview is one of the reasons I stick with Mac OS. I'm
| surprised how far behind other operating systems remain when it
| comes to viewing PDFs. Thank you!
| monocasa wrote:
| For those who don't know, Quartz (the 2D graphics layer of macOS)
| is internally built off of PDF.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of...
| ask_b123 wrote:
| Something else I found (by browsing the linked page) is that you
| can drag (while pressing cmd) and drop one of your apps to the
| top of the Finder.
|
| Removing the app by dragging it back results in a poof animation
| that I can only describe as adorable. It is so cartoony!
| dlivingston wrote:
| I love the little "Easter egg"-y details like this.
|
| Others of note:
|
| - A detected server on your network will, if it's not a Mac,
| display as an ancient CRT monitor with the blue screen of death
| [0]
|
| - TextEdit.app's icon used to have the transcript of "Here's to
| the crazy ones..." [1]
|
| A few others, which may or may not still exist: [2]
|
| Apple is slowly stripping these out - the little glimpses of
| the personalities of people who made them - and it makes me
| sad.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/l5ft60/macos_easter_...
|
| [1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/media/macrumors-png.232193/
|
| [2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/mac-os-x-easter-
| eggs-2013-4
| vampiretooth1 wrote:
| Preview is an underground juggernaut. The app is incredibly
| versatile, and I've used it as a lightweight replacement for
| almost everything Adobe
| wafriedemann wrote:
| Preview - the app that made my mother ask me countless of times
| how to merge PDFs (and still does)
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| macOS has so many essential utilities and tools I can not live
| without. System wide dictionary and looking up a translation is
| something I use every single day. Screenshot and screen recording
| is utility I use every week.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Speaking of the dictionary, it can be invoked by opening the
| search with CMD+space, which brings me to one of my favourite
| features, the capacity to calculate currency changes, just
| write X dollar to eur and it will automatically compute the
| exchange.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| It also works for different units. e. g. type 4'5'' to m.
|
| Additionally, the dictionary definitions can be invoked by
| tapping with three fingers (Trackpad settings).
| mattl wrote:
| I love Preview and I can get about 80% of the things I'd use GIMP
| for on Linux done with it.
| pletnes wrote:
| One more thing: if you select an area of a pdf, you can
| copy/paste, retaining vector graphics info. Never seen that in
| any other app. Works in several other macos apps, too.
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