Comments on: In Praise of Preview

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:23:09 +0000

Preview is good, but it won’t display text from PDFs exported directly from Photoshop, which is very annoying since preview is so widely used, it makes exporting PDFs from Photoshop a right pain.

By: Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:37:25 +0000

It renders pdfs better than Adobe, it saves, it crops. I use it every day all the time. The best aplication ever!

By: Lane Good

Lane Good — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:06:33 +0000

Buttons that turn on mp3 sound files in the pdf document work well in the Acrobat Reader but are completely disabled in Preview.

By: Jim Whimpey » Preview

Jim Whimpey » Preview — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:04:46 +0000

[...] In praise of Preview. I couldn’t agree more with The Apple Blog’s praise of Preview. There is no preview equivalent in Windows and it’s one of those small things that makes using OS X all that much nicer. [...]

By: Jinjur

Jinjur — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:37:57 +0000

Preview’s PDF support improves significantly with every Mac OS release. Preview never will match Adobe Reader feature for feature but as someone pointed out Preview handles 95% of the PDF’s you are likely to encounter. With Leopard that might be more like 99%. Like I said, it gets better with every release….

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:43:02 +0000

Feh. I use a Mac at work and read a good number of PDFs from various sources throughout the day. And I use Acrobat.

Granted Preview is in many ways more elegant and feels “lighter.” But the showstopper failing for me is that full text search utterly fails in some PDFs, just zero hits in cases where Acrobat will find multiple hits. It’s like the Adobe software can just find the text better.

Disclaimer, my Mac uses 10.3.8, my Acrobat Reader is 6.0.1. It’s possible Preview has improved in this regard.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 06:16:09 +0000

Preview is awesome, it’s PDF done right. Acrobat is incredibly slow, and the ONLY time I use it is for forms work.

Preview is set to open all PDFs on my macs.

By: Renderdog

Renderdog — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:52:20 +0000

james is right, Preview is fast and conveneint for PDF’s but very annoying with images, I have no idea how those bugs have persisted.

By: DAG

DAG — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:35:31 +0000

Preview’s functionality is great for most of us, but the UI needs work. A transparent, floating window ( like iPhoto ) would beat the drop menus and buttons.

By: james

james — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 14:58:06 +0000

Couple comments regarding image resizing vs. image rescaling
You can’t resize an image file in Preview. You’re only able to rescale how it’s viewed. It was not the intent of Preview (iPhoto, Photoshop etc can take care of that with various degrees of control).
Preview’s image viewing size options are very clunky. For example: I just opened an image and it’s “Actual size” came out to 74.9%, (and yes, my prefs are set to “Default Image Scale: Default Size”) when I scaled it up (command +) I end up with 105.9% – all i want is the image 100%! I find this not only odd, but annoying. Why would any image app make it a manual effort to type in 100% just to see an image at it’s actual 100% size? Any web browser can do that. Thumbs Down.

By: DWalla

DWalla — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 09:30:37 +0000

I agree… Preview rocks. I rarely open PDF or other image files in Photoshop or Acrobat unless I have some serious editing to do. Preview is so speedy that there isn’t any need to use anything else.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 09:17:59 +0000

No size adjustment?

So what is the option “Auto-scale” in its preferences for then?

Besides, I haven’t found yet that control+mouse-scroll-wheel won’t work for *any* screen content.

By: Win

Win — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 01:02:30 +0000

I might agree except for Preview’s lame performance in displaying a pdf in Safari with no size adjustment so that it is readable. I don’t want to download every pdf I see just to take a look at it. Fix that and I could give up Reader.

By: Publius

Publius — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 22:03:16 +0000

Look for Apple to buy Adobe in 2007….

By: Steve K.

Steve K. — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 21:31:10 +0000

Between the built-in features of the OS X print panel to turn anything into a PDF and Preview’s ability to read PDF files there’s no need for Acrobat. Good riddens to bloatware!

By: Fairfact

Fairfact — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 18:04:20 +0000

I’ve been a Mac user since the debut of the original 128k machine in 1984. I run an all-Apple business, but I’m no fan of Preview. I much prefer the way Adobe Reader opens and treats pages. I have Preview buried in some folder and have set Adobe Reader as my default app for opening pdf files.