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Equivalent of OSX's Preview for windows?

GorillaPaws

GorillaPaws

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 26, 2003
932
8
Richmond, VA
I really don't know a whole lot about the windows world, and I was hoping one of you could give me some advice about PC software. We've got several PC's in our office running windows and I am looking for a rough equivalent of OSX's Preview app.

When I google it, I am bombarded by tons of crapware, and many are fairly pricy given my needs. We really only need to be able to rotate pages, delete pages, and divide multiple-page pdf's into separate documents. Acrobat reader won't let you do this and save the changes. You have to upgrade to the $299 app. That price seems pretty outrageous given our limited needs, and especially because we would need to buy the software for several machines.

Do any of you have any apps that you use on your windows machines that you would recommend to this sheltered OSX user (It's moments like these that really make me appreciate my macs)?
 
I too have been searching for an equivalent program for our office's use. It seems silly to purchase Adobe Acrobat (for Windows) to save a .pdf when OS X has the ability built in.

Any suggestions?
 
jocamero said:
I too have been searching for an equivalent program for our office's use. It seems silly to purchase Adobe Acrobat (for Windows) to save a .pdf when OS X has the ability built in.

Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Save as PDF is free when you use Office.
 
GorillaPaws said:
I really don't know a whole lot about the windows world, and I was hoping one of you could give me some advice about PC software. We've got several PC's in our office running windows and I am looking for a rough equivalent of OSX's Preview app.
Click to expand...

Preview app as one app that does it all? I don't think the companies that make the software would be too happy about Microsoft doing that. Don't forget, the EU gets angry when Microsoft bundles their own media player.
 
To write PDFs for free you can use a Postscript printer driver like OS X has built-in. CutePDF is freeware and uses GNU Ghostscript for printing PDF files.
The CutePDF Pro package allows editing of PDFs.
 
Assuming you've got PDF creation sorted already... the following stuff is useful. (if you haven't, I use PDFCreator, which is an open source thing)


ByCPDFMetaEdit is handy for deleting, reordering pages and adding metadata etc

Rotation, watermarking and a few other things can be done with http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html Just ignore the Editor programme - it's a freeware thing that also installs a shareware programme you can just ignore.

http://www.geocities.com/aebpr/ is a program that decrypts PDFs when you don't know the password, in many cases anyway, without taking ages cracking the password.


I'm sure there's loads of other stuff out there, but having trawled through the mound of crapware a long time ago those were the things I settled on.


If you're looking at pay-for stuff, Jaws PDF Editor is quite capable. Depending what version of Windows you have (i.e. Vista requires 8.1+) you might consider an old/cheap copy of acrobat. I've seen Acrobat 8 even go for <60 on ebay if you catch the right moment.


One other thing, which I use both on Mac and Windows (or at least did before I escaped Windows - Yay!) is that if you have a Canon scanner, the CanoScan ToolBox or MX Navigator software are both very handy.

It can do page rotation, ordering and OCR on PDFs as you create them from a scanner, but it can also be fooled into doing OCR on existing stuff if you convert it to bitmaps, scan the correct number of 'pages' (just select a tiny scan area for speed) then replace all its temp files with the ones you actually want. The location of the temp files is listed somewhere in one of the dialogues. It's a bit of a pain, but it's free so if you don't want to do it often it's useful. Otherwise, buy Acrobat.

Yay for Preview.app! between that and ByCPDFMetaEdit and AEBPR (both of which work perfectly under WINE and Crossover) and the Canon stuff I'm sorted :)

hope some of this helps
 
Another option

I've just found another option, that is more similar to Preview. It's a freeware app with some free features and some paid features (€19.95), but even the freeware features include plenty that Preview.app doesn't have, such as more flexible annotation, markup, line drawing, type-over etc. Page deletion etc is paid though.

It works flawlessly under Wine/Crossover on Mac so I've added it to my arsenal.

In the paid version it would be the closest thing to preview I've seen (and in fact better, if not as pretty).

It's called PDF XChange Viewer - just google. The Pro version has more features, but the free is still very useful. Combined with the other stuff I mentioned before you have a fairly major set of tools.
 
Just need to view images

Is there a Windows app. that can just view a wide variety of graphics file formats as Mac OSX Preview does? No manipulation (except, perhaps CW or CCW 90° rotation) is needed. Our Windows clients send us art files without being able to see them.
 
In Windows, you can get a preview of any document (that the OS knows how to open) in the left pane of an explorer window. However it is still Windows which means the preview takes a while. On my work windows box, I use sumatrapdf which is a freeware pdf viewer. I have adobe reader on my system but prefer not to open it if I can avoid it.

What I really miss in windows is quickview. We use pdfexchange to write pdfs, I will have to grab the pdf exchange viewer and see if it's better than sumatrapdf. But sadly there is still no true "quickview" solution on windows. I've tried launchy to replace spotlight/quicksilver but there is nothing that approaches quickview for speed and number of formats supported.

While quickview on OS X is bulletproof, quickview on iPad has a ways to go to catch up. I do notice that quickview on ipad sometimes munges spreadsheets created by openoffice.org but I don't mind launching docs2go or pages to see what's really inside those few files.
 
PDFsam

Hi. I found a little java based program called PDFsam (split and merge) which works on both mac and windows.

It has many features for managing pdfs.
 
entodoays said:
Hi. I found a little java based program called PDFsam (split and merge) which works on both mac and windows.

It has many features for managing pdfs.
Click to expand...

I actually installed this today on a Windows machine and on my Mac running OS X 10.7 Lion. The reason I installed it on my Mac was simply to see what its interface looked like, so I could more easily explain it to a coworker who is ostensibly going to be using it on her PC here at the office. The "Mac version" is just the crappy Windows interface version ported over to OS X, and, while it installed and seemed to be okay, when I attempted to run a split PDF job I found that...

IT DOESN'T WORK ON LION.

This is to say nothing about its functionality on Windows - I have no idea yet, and I'll be trying that, along with PDFill Free PDF Tools as mentioned by a poster above, which seems to be able to split PDFs, which i all my PC-user coworker needs to do. (I of course could easily do this in seconds with Preview on OS X, but I need to give her a solution on PC that she can use on her own... I can't wait til we replace her Dell with Mac - the solution to most problems of this sort!)
 
Can any of these open multiple PDFs at once (like Preview can)?

I'm looking for a Windows app that can open multiple PDFs at once. This allows the user to scroll seamlessly between the pages of one PDF into the pages of the next.

Do any of the programs mentioned above do this? I've checked out screenshots and downloaded a couple, but no luck so far...
 
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