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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

It’s better than free: already paid for.

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

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