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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

Preview has to be one of the most under-appreciated apps on MacOS. It implements so much handy everyday functionality that requires third-party software on Windows. Or did, last time I used Windows (admittedly some time ago).

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Yes, really. I use it all the time.

On feature that I use a lot in Preview is to combine pdf's. If you e.g. have a pdf invoice and want to combine that with the corresponding pdf receipt from the bank, I just open the two pdf files side by side in thumbnail view and just drag the pages (thumbnails) I want from one document to the other where I want to place them; rearranging the pages (thumbnails) later if I need to in the same thumbnail view. I am a huge fan of Preview! :-)

Recently learned about Ghostscript and man, it does PDF manipulation really fast. If you find yourself merging PDFs a lot, here you are:

    gs -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o merged.pdf tobemerged1.pdf tobemerged2.pdf tobemerged3.pdf

Ghostscript is similar to ImageMagick in that it does so much that learning to do one specific thing is hard. But that line merged ~300MB of PDFs together in 20s on my M1. Doing that in Preview causes a beach ball.

I installed it with Homebrew, but the project home is yonder: https://www.ghostscript.com/

I love the integration with iOS as well. I was pleasantly surprised to find an option in Preview to use my iPad and the Apple Pencil for my signature. It even popped up some otherwise hidden UI on the iPad to do so.

Preview is the reason my personal, non-gaming computing is still on MacOS and not purely iOS. I'm not even joking.

Preview has an odd selection of functions, though. On one hand it allows you to do plenty of these functions that you mention, but otoh misses on very trivial stuff like "I'd like to make my image a bit larger so I could paste another one next to it".

Isn’t that just on the menu > adjust image size?

I mean, extend the canvas but keep the original image as it is.

Ahh, yes. I have wanted to do this too, and can’t. I suspect Preview isn’t the tool I’m supposed to use, even though it’s the ones I want to use as it doesn’t almost everything I want.

Exactly! It does everything BUT that, and because of that you have to go open a different app.

On Windows, everything requires a third party app. It's insane.

I wanted to convert XML to JSON. Well: Tough luck. Go download some app by some person from the store. We are sure it's completely safe!

Want to convert a video to a gif? Get another bloatware program.

There is so much command line stuff Linux users take for granted that Windows people struggle with every day.

on windows i find myself bouncing around a lot between pdf viewers, choosing between lightweight but feature sparse options (sumatra) and heavier, more featured programs (acrobat, foxit)

i've never thought about replacing preview.

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