Comment by zbentley
13 hours ago
What does Preview do that's hard to match?
Genuine question. I've been a Mac user for decades and on balance think it's quite good, but Preview is one of the most deeply frustrating, buggy, and unintuitive pieces of software on the system--it's at the top of the list of things that I wish I could swap out for something--anything, MS paint would be fine--else that was as deeply integrated in Finder/image/PDF interactions.
You can easily copy and paste rectangular selections from PDF's into Pages. I haven't found anything analogous on other OS'es. I used this to compile exam questions for my students.
It's also great for editing PDF's, you can markup, reorder, rotate and delete pages with ease. Yes other software does that but not as intuitively as Preview.
You can compress PDF's by exporting them and selecting a filter.
It's also the fastest and best-rendering PDF viewer I've used.
I haven’t heard that many complaints about Preview. (Except for PDF forms. Absolute disaster. See 1.) But it’s not perfect and I can definitely appreciate that somebody would a very different opinion of it from my own.
So, I’m sharing my personal experience. This is what I see in it.
It handles both images and PDFs rather well (1) in the same application. And you use the same basic set of annotation tools on both.
I haven’t found anything that can match its combination of accuracy, performance, and features with PDFs. Especially when files get large. (I have a lot of large PDFs.)
And it doesn’t try to do all that much. But it does two very useful things I wouldn’t expect it to do.
- Easily add, remove, and re-order pages in PDFs.
- If you select multiple images in Finder, you can open them all in single Preview window and it acts like a PDF, with each image being a page in the thumbnail sidebar. You can rapidly go through a set of images this way.
I have a lot of high-resolution artwork and a professional grade printer. Preview does an excellent job of staying out of the way. It’s really easy and fast to chop up, resize, and convert images. The color adjustment is constantly useful when it comes to printing things that are too dark.
Exporting to different formats is pretty easy. It uses the system print dialog, which allows you to use all of those features.
1: It’s horrific with PDF forms. I’ve definitely had occasions when it looked filled out but emailed as a blank form. Completely unacceptable. I’ve often resorted generating a new PDF using the print dialog.
Also, Preview is the easiest way to sign anything sent as PDF.
Forms are hit and miss. I assume there's a PDF issue since some forms work great.
And you don't have to install it since it's a stock app. This might sound trivial, but good stock apps cut down on time to get a new machine/install in usable condition substantially, even if you're using a package manager.
Personally I think every computer should come with a Preview equivalent (or better).