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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When has Reader allowing rotating pages? I don't think Reader has ever allowed saving or modifying PDFs in any way save for perhaps filling form fields...
What Adobe is doing, however, is to add icons and menu entries for editing functionality that will never work in Reader, advertising the features of their PDF editing software. That's, basically, yet another extremely intrusive advertising strategy that's annoying as hell and that I guess we are bound to see even more of it in the future.
Apple has been quietly using the same screenshot functionality since the 90s, and has continually iterated over improvements on Preview since the early 2000s.
I find the macos shortcuts to be poorly chosen and un-discoverable, but they've stuck with it, so finding how to take a screenshot is extremely easy.
Microsoft:
Microsoft is on their third major revamp of screenshots. There are six(!) different ways to invoke a screenshot on Window 11 - printscrn key, Win+Shift+S, snip and sketch, snipping tool, game bar, pressing the volume up+power buttons on supported devices (but not all). Microsoft's official website suggests third party tools in their app store as well. Each way offers different options (such as whole screen, individual app, cropping, etc). Some options quietly redirect you to other options, while still offering the previous option in contextual menus. Options will vary in where they place the image as well - filesystem, clipboard, or directly into a window for you to chose.
Microsoft uses their browser as a featureless PDF reader. Other Preview.app functionality can be found within a combination of paint.exe and the new Windows Photos app - each with a completely different UI paradigm. They do not have an OCR solution - or if they do, I haven't found it.
My understanding is that Windows 12 is a direct attempt to resolve a lot of these issues, and that Windows 11 has been deemed "transitional", but it's still extremely exhausting. I personally still prefer Windows over macOS (for a lot of reasons unrelated to Windows' incredibly boneheaded rough edges); but, please, Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing!?
I have an Acrobat Pro 7.0 license I paid for years and years ago. I have a single use case: I scan a lot of vintage computer manuals as a hobby. Pro offers fine control over compression options. Acrobat has been nagging me for more than a decade to register it (though I registered it when I bought it). A couple of times I've had computer crashes or migrations and getting 7.0 reinstalled on the new machine was a pain.
It galls me to think they want $500 for me to buy Pro again when I don't need or want any of the new features. I just want the existing functionality I paid for to continue working.
Do any of the alternatives have similar fine control of compression options that Acrobat Pro exposes? I'd switch in a heartbeat.
This is not a pro tip. LibreOffice can import a PDF and export a PDF but, even with minimal changes, the PDF you get out won't necessarily have a similar binary representation or appearance to the original.
I think there's also the implication of 'pro', as if the rest of HN are not software professionals. I'd suggest GP to revise the structure of their comment in order to not offend the entire forum.
Most of the PDF editing I do is the equivalent to physically typing over, covering over, or cutting elements out of a print document. I would not expect a an editor to be able to (for example) reflow the layout of PDF.
In my experience, LibreOffice Draw usually messes up the formatting of any PDFs I open in it. Nothing entirely unsalvageable, but text gets slightly moved around and winds up overlapping other text in a way that's annoying for future readers of the document.
In my experience, every open source PDF Reader/Editor, is ATROCIOUS and messes up the formatting big time. I wish there was an alternative out there that was as good as adobe, but as with all of their other tools, the alternatives always leave much to be desired.
And then adobe takes advantage of that fact (Their product is second to none), and rail their customers by making their products expensive AF.
TLDR: Adobe products are AMAZING. Their pricing structure and marketing techniques and straight up disrespect to their customers is absolute garbage.
I have been actively moving away from Adobe products. Recently purchased Affinity Photo to replace photoshop and I use Preview (on Mac) for all pdf work.
The Affinity products on Mac are some of the cleanest, polished, reasonably easy to use, responsive, and stable pieces of commercial image software I've used in years. Very impressed with what they've done so far.
They also have a good offer on at the moment. They’ve released V2 and are offering all 3 apps on all supported formats for a single payment. Personally I only use Designer so didn’t partake, but even that is discounted a little.
I’ve ben actively avoiding Adobe for about a decade now. Affinity is great. Adobe needs to learn to respect its users and not take them for granted while feeding them crap.
You can still rotate PDF pages using the Reader desktop app. However, as other posters have recommended, there are many alternative PDF apps. Avoid Adobe if you can.
Fake news. Acrobat Reader (free) never let you edit PDFs. Reader has always let you rotate the view. <View> <Rotate View>. Clockwise and Counterclockwise!
I remember learning PostScript (~1993?) by reading the Red Book, and thinking how awesome it was that this company Adobe, which I'd never heard of, had created a new programming language just to solve once and for all the problem of specifying vector graphics to a printer, and had written such a nice book to help others use the language. It was magical to be able to write a text file in emacs, send it to the printer, and have cool images come out.
Good old days.
btw PDF started as Project Camelot at Adobe in ~1990, as a way to capture the results of executing a PostScript program [1]. I'm curious if there is still that kind of foundational innovation happening at Adobe, and if not, why it died?
Did you ever look in detail at Common Ground? IIRC, it was not only an Adobe PDF alternative, but the format was considerably more modern and powerful. Sadly, it seems like it lost just because PDF was similar to PostScript, a fact that never really made any real difference to anyone but programmers writing PDF parsers. (And PostScript smelled like the future, since Display PostScript was the basis for displays (well, kinda) at NeXT and Sun, and those were definitely the cool kids...
That sounds cool; hadn't heard of it. The web searches I've just tried to look for technical details yielded not much; are there any extant open specs?
More than ever I feel vindicated in the decision to avoid non-free software. It's limiting of course but in tandem with a fully reproducible system it is guaranteed that my current workflows will always be available... I can't imagine doing anything in software without that foundation.
The recent news about Adobe removing Pantone colors from existing projects is even more egregious:
Adobe Document Cloud has some nice features that are unique in the market, and are worthy being paid features. But sadly they are hidden under a sea of very basic feature like this one, totally unworthy of a paid feature — this make the good feature less noticeable.
One of the paid feature that I really like is fluid PDF on mobile screen. Most PDF is not very readable on mobile screen, it needs pan and zoom. The fluid feature make the layout become more HTML-like and fluid, and adapt to mobile screen size. That is a feature to monetize. not rotating pages!
I wanted to combine a few PDFs into 1 big one, and I noticed adobe.com offers that for free (but it requires user registration). Now I just remembered that Gimp can open PDFs, and each page would be its own layer. Probablt good enough for some light editing.
I’m 80% at requiring it for anyone at the company that doesn’t need full acrobat to create PDFs. And even then I’m close to pushing the version of FoxIt that does that.
I use okular and it works great on linux. Once in a while PDFs with forms display funny, or some minor challenges with data entry....but not sure if the issue is how the pdf was made or if okular. Nevertheless, i really like it. Plus as stated, a few KDE applications like okular happliy can be used on Windows. (For work machine, where i am forced to use Windows, i happily have used the Kate text editor.)
I think PDF Xchange is the most feature rich for what I use it for. You do have to buy once to unlock all functionality, but a very large amount is available in the free version.
On Linux: zathura, evince, okular for viewing. I don't know of a friendly GUI tool for editing PDFs, but combinations of imagemagick and tools such as pdfunite work well. A bit off-topic, but nomacs and imv are nice for images.
In chrome://flags you can search for "PDF" and enable the following: Performs OCR on inaccessible PDFs, PDF XFA support, Accessible PDF Forms, Enable Region Search on PDF viewer.
The rotate option under the view menu works, but doesn't let you save the rotated view. If you attempt to rotate pages from the edit menu, you get a pop up forcing you to subscribe to use that feature.
The only rollout here is they've added another ad for their subscription. Acrobat Reader has never had edit capabilities - you can't and have never been able to edit and save the PDF in any way (except filling form fields maybe?).
You could always rotate the view, that's not changed.
