41–50 of 174 posts
Preview.app is actually one of the few first-party Apple apps that I really miss when using a non-macOS computer.
that plus the quick look from smashing the space bar in Finder. selecting a file and hitting space is muscle memory for me, and the first time I do it on a non-macOS computer it just feels broken to me.
What are people using as a free (edit: or lifetime license) PDF editor for business use / non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably run into something we need acrobat for.
I have grok produce a precise transcription of the text, then have chatgpt produce an editable word document, including forms, following the text that grok picked up (it's a lot better at OCR, for some reason) And then if I need to produce another pdf, I export it from Word. PDFs are silly. It's tech superstition, kinda like the belief that faxes are secure.
I also can’t run sensitive docs through LLMs. This stuff has to stay local.
I worked on a PDF form that was distributed widely within a Gov department. It would be routinely saved locally and emailed half completed up the managerial chain for sign-off on the request.
It had a lot of dynamic fields so you had to allow it to run macros.
The first thing it did was check the version of the just opened form and replace it with the latest PDF from the department's server.
It also had save/resume functionality which would only work in Acrobat Reader at the time.
Edit: Shout out to Inkscape which I find is a handy replacement for Illustrator and doing minor fixes to PDFs.
What are people using as a free (edit: or lifetime license) PDF editor for business use / non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably run into something we need acrobat for.
Acrobat 9.0
Preview is probably the best thing that has happened since I switched to Mac almost two decades ago.
What I hate about Preview on macOS is that all opened PDFs are kept in memory as opposed to freeing up the memory when the PDF is not active. Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.
Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.
On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?
What are people using as a free (edit: or lifetime license) PDF editor for business use / non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably run into something we need acrobat for.