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
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 …
Read More
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 …
Read More
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 …
Read More
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 …
Read More
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 …
Read More
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 …
Read More
Thinkpad X390 Yoga mini-review
About two and a half months ago, I bought a Wacom digitizer to do doodles with, but I found the process of sketching with a standalone digitizer a bit dissatisfying after using an iPad in years past. To be clear, the fact that the screen and digitizer are separate devices …
Read More
Unix Data Compression Shootout
I wanted to try a new-to-me compressor, lz4, but it turned into a full ADHD-fueled file compression shoot-out:
Dang, lz4 is crazy fast!
Data/setup
The corpus is a 2.29 GiB uncompressed tar file consisting of several years worth of GPS data in various plain-text formats.
The computer is …
Read More
I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence
One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience. There's no one big central network, so posts have nebulous reach throughout the network, depending on how well-"connected" your instance is, and many people set posts to auto-delete after a set period of time …
Read More