Sat 09 August 2025

Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org

In yesterday's post, I talked about the things I do and don't miss about MacOS, mainly focusing on the global menubar search as the main positive from my experience with Mac OS X.

Looking over blog post ideas note today, I realized that I missed a major one: Preview.app. Originating in the very first version of NextStep as a PostScript previewer (likely not a difficult job, as NextStep's display subsystem was based on Display Postscript), Preview grew over the years to the point that it became a much more functional PDF utility than "proper" Adobe Acrobat (to say nothing of far more enjoyable to use: Acrobat is such a turd!!! 💩)

I often used Preview for annotating and signing PDFs. It was simply the best PDF program I had ever used, and did a lot for me in my daily work.

When I switched back to using the Linux desktop full-time, I started searching for a Preview.app replacement.

Believe me when I tell you that I pretty much tried them all (not including non-FOSS programs). There are some really nice and fairly fully-featured PDF viewers like Okular and Evince, some very nice minialist viewers like Zathura, and some really excellent markup/editing utilities, but there are none that do it all, like Preview.app did.

What I finally had to do was find a mix of utilities that covered all of the features I used to use Preview.app for. There's no one that does it all, but by combining several FOSS utilites, I have been able to do all I needed to do with PDFs:

• Basic viewing
  • Zathura, Sioyek, Okular, or Evince
• Basic annotation (drawing shapes only, no images)
  • Okular or Evince
• Flexible annotation (inserting images/signatures, etc)
  • Xournal++ or possibly Inkscape or LibreOffice Draw
• Adding/removing PDF pages, combining PDFs
  • PDFArranger or possibly Poppler pdfunite (command line)
• Extracting images from a PDF (not actually a Preview.app feature, but handy to know how to do)
  • pdfimages (command line)

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 50

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Productivity Unix Tips