5 ms·

Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.

by fallingknife 6y ago

nsb1 6y ago
Wow...TIL...
- shaan7 6y ago
  Yeah thats the other thing I found fascinating about macOS, a bunch of useful features are very hard to discover. Mostly because you won't see any menu entries, but some sort of drag-and-drop will / alt+click will activate a very useful feature. Their idea of being user friendly, I guess.
  - argvargc 6y ago
    Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS. So many tremendously useful things are hidden. Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens. Just tell us how to use it. Almost every (third-party) iOS app or game by comparison seems to have understood this basic concept of educating the user on how to use the product, but Apple falls far behind especially on macOS.
    - shaan7 6y ago
      My guess is that this is the compromise they strike to reduce the "number of options" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - prestonbriggs 6y ago
      Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple won't publish manuals.
      - zsmi 6y ago
        https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome-mh43558/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome-mh43558/mac
SirHound 6y ago
Yeah I found out you can combine two videos in QuickTime by dragging one into the other. Amazing but I had to Google it
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  Wow, that really beats ffmpeg’s concat demuxer
aidos 6y ago
You can shift/cmd select a few pages and drop them out into finder as a new pdf too.
Tyr42 6y ago
It also works on Gif images. You can take apart the frames.
CalChris 6y ago
I use Preview for merging + deleting pages which is rare but useful but otherwise I use Skim.
theobeers 6y ago
Do be careful, though, when collating PDFs with Preview. I've had several experiences where the resulting file works fine in Preview, but can't be opened by other PDF readers, e.g. Acrobat Reader. Share the file with a non-Mac user and they'll be scratching their head… I have to do a lot of PDF manipulation for my work, and after some time I accepted, grudgingly, that there's no substitute for Acrobat Pro.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  What I have found is that when annotating PDF's the annotations show up, except on Acrobat. Never could figure out how to fix.

Preview is awesome! My favorite feature is splitting up and combining PDF's by dragging and dropping the pages.

nsb1 6y ago

Wow...TIL...

shaan7 6y ago
Yeah thats the other thing I found fascinating about macOS, a bunch of useful features are very hard to discover. Mostly because you won't see any menu entries, but some sort of drag-and-drop will / alt+click will activate a very useful feature. Their idea of being user friendly, I guess.
- argvargc 6y ago
  Actually, this is one of my biggest problems with macOS. So many tremendously useful things are hidden. Why do they do this? It's not good for anyone. I can understand this concept of "just do what's intuitive - try it!", oh what fun - but nobody is going to risk messing up the important files they're working with by randomly dragging things onto other things just to see what happens. Just tell us how to use it. Almost every (third-party) iOS app or game by comparison seems to have understood this basic concept of educating the user on how to use the product, but Apple falls far behind especially on macOS.
  - shaan7 6y ago
    My guess is that this is the compromise they strike to reduce the "number of options" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - prestonbriggs 6y ago
    Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple won't publish manuals.
    - zsmi 6y ago
      https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome-mh43558/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome-mh43558/mac

SirHound 6y ago

Yeah I found out you can combine two videos in QuickTime by dragging one into the other. Amazing but I had to Google it

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
Wow, that really beats ffmpeg’s concat demuxer

aidos 6y ago

You can shift/cmd select a few pages and drop them out into finder as a new pdf too.

Tyr42 6y ago

It also works on Gif images. You can take apart the frames.

CalChris 6y ago

I use Preview for merging + deleting pages which is rare but useful but otherwise I use Skim.

theobeers 6y ago

Do be careful, though, when collating PDFs with Preview. I've had several experiences where the resulting file works fine in Preview, but can't be opened by other PDF readers, e.g. Acrobat Reader. Share the file with a non-Mac user and they'll be scratching their head… I have to do a lot of PDF manipulation for my work, and after some time I accepted, grudgingly, that there's no substitute for Acrobat Pro.

fallingknife 6y ago
What I have found is that when annotating PDF's the annotations show up, except on Acrobat. Never could figure out how to fix.