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Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

For anyone on a Mac: all of these features in the screenshot are free with Preview. I assume OP is not, but something people should keep in mind.

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I wish this got talked about more, Preview is both crazy good and free. You can split PDFs apart, merge multiple different ones into one file, use password protected files, edit and annotate them, add your signature, and so much more. Best of all, it just works, all the time.

What is the trick to merging multiple PDFs into one? That never seems to work for me.

I open them both, then select and drag the pages from one to the other. (Left side bar where the page thumbnails are shown)

As I just posted elsewhere, I do find I sometimes have to copy a PDF before it'll let me do this to it. I assume it's some kind of flag that isn't preserved through the copy and there's actually a better way to fix it, but my work-around is simple enough that I've never bothered to figure out what it is.

Either drag between Preview windows or a simple copy paste works for me.

Open up two docs in preview. Let's say Doc A is the one you want to merge into. Open Thumbnail view in each doc. Select pages in Doc B you want to merge over to Doc A (some or all). Drag and drop into thumbnails view in Doc A. Reorder as desired. Profit.

Copy + paste also works.

Been a while since I used it but IIRC you should be able to show the page thumbnails sidebar in each document and drag them from one window into another.

Probably also accessible via Preview’s Automator/Shortcuts actions if it’s something you need to do frequently.

Copy a selection of pages from an existing PDF, choose File > New from clipboard. From that point you can edit the pages in the PDF using the thumbnails sidebar and drag pages from other PDFs into the bar.

Agreed, but the inability of Preview to edit text must be noted.

PDF is meant as an output format.

Fonts might or might not be embedded.

Paragraphs might be split into chunks, words, characters or simply outlines.

There’s no typesetting config. Nothing about margins, spacing, hyphenation, etc.

But then again, sometimes there is. The point is that it’s an output format.

FoxIt PDF (and others) edit PDF perfectly.

Even Word, LibreOffice, InkScape, etc do to a certain extent.

That’s like editing a printed version of a website :-)

I’ll work to a certain extent. Not sure how line breaks would work, but PDF is an extensible format, so these days they might include enough info to edit that

Preview is great.

I can also recommend Skim (free and open source) for macOS for some additional functionality [1].

[1]: https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/

Also Sumatra on Windows.

Love Preview and for all those basics find it much easier than Adobe for rotating, rearranging, deleting, merging, etc. Alas for some things still need Acrobat. For forms that need to be filled in more often than not preview is problematic where the entered text doesn’t appear right or issues with drop-downs etc. Like how I prefer safari but still run into compatibility issues sometimes and need Chrome. Also Adobe is better at compressing file size while retaining quality. And finally if I need to ocr a file and make the text or elements editable need Adobe. Would love to see Preview improved in those areas as solid as Preview it’s not one to see growth in features or compatibility over the decades.

Preview does OCR now too, I think. I can select text in JPEGs, I presume it works on PDFs too.

It’s better than free: already paid for.

I had to download Acrobat for something (I don’t recall what) on my work computer, and it set itself as a default, and for the past few weeks whenever i open a PDF I’m wondering why it’s taking forrreeevvverr. Then I remember it’s Adobe and not Preview.

I need to uninstall it but I keep forgetting. This is a good remembrance

Stuff people don't know about Preview.app:

- Paste images that were copied to the clipboard. Just open Preview and press CMD-N

- Split, re-arrange and merge PDF documents. Just drag pages into the sidebar

- Sign documents. Click the annotation button in the menu bar, sign either on touchpad, ipad or hold an ink signature on paper into the webcam.

- OCR (new with macOS ventura). Just click/drag/double-click on text in images.

What more did I forget?

> Paste images that were copied to the clipboard. Just open Preview and press CMD-N

This one is new to me. TIL. Thanks!

You can remove white/back backgrounds from images as well, with the "Magic Lasso" selection tool. Adjust the selection level until it covers the object you want, cmd+c to copy that object out of the image, then cmd+n to create a new image from that selection.

It's legit one of the reasons I'll have trouble ever leaving macOS. I've not seen anything as good at its particular niche. It's the perfect intersection of lightweight, snappy, reliable (so many other PDF tools are crashy or prone to getting in weird, broken states), and featureful.

OCR works for me in Monterey.

I recently had to crop a pdf, Export pdf to png, crop and save as pdf. All from Preview app.

Not really something you missed but if I want to increase the “viewport” of an image, I just take a screenshot (to clipboard), create a new document, paste the screenshot, and then go back to my original image and copy/paste it to the new document.

This is helpful if you want to extend an image horizontally or vertically (or both).

You could also increase the dimensions of the original image, but it would “zoom in”, which I don’t want.

Not sure I explained it well…

Annotation. Colour correction including white balance picker. And so on

This ^. Don't give Adobe money is my motto.

Mine is don't give Apple money.

Preview.app is very underrated. It feels like a huge omission that other platforms don't have something similar built in.

And if you need more editing features than Preview.app (which is already very powerful), PDF Expert [1] is my go-to on the App Store.

[1]: https://pdfexpert.com/

For anyone else I recommend pdf arranger [1]

[1] https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger

You can also use Preview to carve up PDFs and assemble new documents from the pages of multiple other PDFs. This is really handy for making e.g. custom bestiaries for RPGs, using pages from official books, since usually you use only a few beasts in a campaign, out of a set of potentially hundreds of first- and third-party ready-to-use beasts. Nice to have them all in one PDF, with nothing you don't need. And of course you can pdf-export whatever you like from your own documents and mix that in, too.

For some reason I've never bothered to figure out, I do sometimes have to copy a PDF before it'll let me re-arrange or copy/cut individual pages out of it. But not always. I assume it's because of some kind of flag on downloaded files in macOS, but IDK.

And for those on Windows and Linux, a somewhat close alternative for Preview is Okular - https://okular.kde.org/en-gb/.

Preview.app — Underrated since 2001.

I distinctly remember a precursor of some sort being available on NeXTStep 3.0 in ‘95 or thereabouts.

I don’t know how much code is still left from back then but it’s the same application as NeXTSTEP’s, although strangely Mac OS X Ventura dropped support for rendering PostScript (there used to be an instant conversion process that would render the PostScript as a PDF even after Apple moved to Quartz from Display PostScript).

Back when macOS was still called Mac OS X, (a subset of) PDF was the internal rendering format for Quartz rendering engine[0]. Their tech demo's also boasted about the ability to trivially edit PDF's. I don't know if any of that still remains in the current macOS versions, but I'm glad PDF editing and 'printing' (directory to PDF file or Preview as PDF) support was never dropped. Along with the excellent built-in screenshot and recording shortcuts.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2000/05/mac-os-x-dp4/4/

And you can easily edit password-protected PDFs by "Printing" as PDF and edit the "print out" PDF.

Had to uninstall Adobe Reader this week because it's become unbearably slow on my 2015 MacBook Pro. I'm talking it can't smooth scroll a 2-page resume PDF.

Preview does the trick just fine.

In Preview on Mac:

CMND+R = rotate right

CMND+L = rotate left

There's a lot of free tools that will do this too on all platforms. Xodo is my go to on Windows/Android/iOS. On Linux evince and okular are both pretty good.

Preview is the best tool for working with PDFs I have used. Just being able to cut pages and reorder them is strangely difficult for everything else.

Preview is very capable but it's UI is so opaque. After years of use I still discover features accidentally, almost like easter eggs.

Don’t forget that the whole macOS GUI is based on PDF.

And guess who developed CUPS? :)

Easy Software Products.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070109004135/http://www.cups.o...

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