Desperately Seeking Preview.app
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
- Basic annotation (drawing shapes only, no images)
- Flexible annotation (inserting images/signatures, etc)
- Adding/removing PDF pages, combining PDFs
- Extracting images from a PDF (not actually a Preview.app feature, but handy to know how to do)
100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 50
What I Do and Don't Miss About MacOS
Background and disclaimer
I was a Mac kid. I was lucky to have my own Mac at home (a relatively low-end one, but still) for most of my high school. And like most people, I do look at the past (particularly the retrocomputing past) with pretty strongly rose-tinted glasses.
But …
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My Favorite GUI Programs, Part II
Background
In yesterday's article, I went over the GUI programs that I enjoyed using over the years and remembered fondly. While I was going to go over TUI programs today, I realized that there's a category of GUI that straddles the line between GUI and TUI that deserved its own …
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My Favorite GUI Programs
Background
Yesterday, I wrote about why I loved the command-line, and one of my good Fedifriends commented that while he appreciated a good command-line program, he generally preferred GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces).
My personal history in computing started with what you might call command-line computers, although I think it's more …
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Why I Love the Command Line
I was going to post a much more serious blog post about anhedonia yesterday, but I didn't get to do so, as I was feeling... anhedonic!
One thing I do when I'm struggling to feel... anything (because I've spent way too much time feeling way too much, but that's a …
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Why I love vim
Disclaimer: I will be using the name/term vim in this blog post, but I actually mean any command-line editor based on or inspired by vi, or "vi-style editors." This includes the original vi, nvi (which IIRC was the basis of the vi that comes with the various BSDs), elVIs …
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My Approach to Online Notes
Note: When I say "Online" in this context, I literally mean "on a computer," vs. "on paper." This is the older, more classic meaning of the word, similar to "on-line documentation" (i.e., "on the computer," not "on the internet").
Background
I know a lot of folks like solutions like …
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A Fine Vintage of Sass
Just now, I was doing what all great bloggers do when they run out of (easily) actionable blog post ideas:
I got around to cruising my RSS feeds!
To be fair, there are many wonderful bloggers that keep up with their RSS feeds and dutifully read and comment on all …
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A Time-Traveler's Guide to Affordable Computing
Greetings! If you are reading this, it means you were selected by TODD (the Temporal Observation Directorate Division) for a temporal excursion. Since you're a member of the Computing Sciences History Reading Room, you will no doubt want to brush up on how to procure computing resources in your assigned …
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What is a blost, anyway?
Welcome to the PADDING.
This blost is a part of the interstitial spaces that make up my blog. It's here to support other blosts. Think of it as one of the glial cells supporting the superstructure of the twisted online brain that is https://rldane.space/.
Of course, that doesn't …
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