231–240 of 337 posts
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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.
How do you trigger this? I'm not seeing it on Monterey + ios 15.4.
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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.
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 i…
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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 th…
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
What more do you want?
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.
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.
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...
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.
Read it through archive.org and you don't get the popup: https://web.archive.org/web/20220509170301/https://www.fourt...
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 br…
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.
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 br…
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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 desi…
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?
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.
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- 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?
> 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…
'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.