The Rise and Fall of Preview | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Preview

pxlnv.com

19 pointsrobenkleene14 comments

I dunno, Preview seems entirely fine to me. I use it constantly.

The entire description of the "fall" described in the link is:

> Since those heady days, Preview has been relatively neglected. Revision of both the Quartz PDF engine and its API brought a spate of bugs that only abated with macOS Sierra. Preview has adopted an uncommon model for PDF annotations that doesn’t work well with other PDF products. Then, in macOS Ventura, Apple removed all support for EPS and PostScript conversion, most probably as a result of ongoing security concerns, and their progressive disuse.

I haven't noticed bugs, annotations seem fine, and EPS/Postscript conversion isn't really about Preview at all.

Sure Preview hasn't been gaining tons of features, but it's a pretty mature app that arguably doesn't really need much else.

Yeah, Preview has always worked great for me. Maybe I am just not using fancy-enough PDFs to notice that it doesn't support some things.

If you annotate PDFs in Preview it is very common to find that they disappear when the PDF is shared with someone else (e.g. when giving feedback on a document), or even when it’s reopened in Preview in the future. Frequent inexplicable data loss is not great.

But indeed, as a pure reader, Preview remains mostly fine.

Annotate all the time and have not hit this issue.

I have found this issue. We run into problems when we have to upload the pdf to software that performs OCR, the annotated text does not get picked up. To fix this, in Preview we have to export the file as a PDF

That sounds like a cloud drive screwing you over or something.

Yes, this happened to me enough times (not with files stored in the cloud) that I stopped using Preview for annotations altogether.

Same experience here. Preview, if anything, always felt like the simplest true to Apple: 'it just works' kind of PDF/file viewer. I am not sure what new features it needs, other than some general improvement to the markup tools.

Link to post referenced in the above link: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/06/01/pdf-on-macs-the-rise-and...

Thanks, this has much more content than the blog repost submitted above.

I haven’t noticed these problems at all (anecdotally) I don’t do much PDF work either but when I do Preview is what I still choose.

Acrobat Reader is not an Electron app.

It is using Chromium Embedded Framework, so it's not using native UI. But it also isn't Electron.

I don't see any Node.js anywhere in Acrobat Reader.

Not much of an article. The "fall from grace has been a slow descent" is explained only with the removal of PostScript support, which the author justifies, and oddly behaving annotations.

I'm pretty sure the author is wishing Preview would receive certain new features, i.e. Apple's neglect is preventing the app from improving. Not sure what those features could be, though.

if memory serves, Display Postscript was a cornerstone of the NeXTStep OS until they figured out that (i) it was dog slow even on an i386 and (ii) Warnock and Adobe wanted a fat share of the pie

i wonder if modern M4 level machines would have been better off with a proper pdf style rendering language than whatever display libs they use today

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