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IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
Another thought about PDF on the Mac. It is not (as intimated by the article) merely a file format supported by Preview that was added because it is useful across platforms. The integration of PDF into the Mac is much deeper than that. One of the best design decisions Apple made with the development of OS X was creating Quartz as a display technology. Quartz is essentially Apple's implementation of PDF. Native outputting of virtually any document to PDF has been a feature of OS X from day one because it's integrated into the OS. At one point early in the OS X development process Apple even demonstrated a PDF editing tool. That app disappeared pretty quickly though. I suspect they ran into trouble with Adobe.
 

MauiPa

macrumors 68040
Apr 18, 2018
3,429
5,080
I agreed with that statement until High Sierra. Several features are broken and PDF scaling is a blurry mess. There have been countless bug reports but no fixes. The majority of Apple's development resources have been reassigned to iOS and it is starting to show.

I'm not sure about that. This went around the Trolliverse awhile back, and came back as not true. Many people are using Preview with no problems at all.

So, unless you can more clearly state the problem as you see it and provide some way of duplicating it, I am going to have to say that I do not believe this statement.
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Another thought about PDF on the Mac. It is not (as intimated by the article) merely a file format supported by Preview that was added because it is useful across platforms. The integration of PDF into the Mac is much deeper than that. One of the best design decisions Apple made with the development of OS X was creating Quartz as a display technology. Quartz is essentially Apple's implementation of PDF. Native outputting of virtually any document to PDF has been a feature of OS X from day one because it's integrated into the OS. At one point early in the OS X development process Apple even demonstrated a PDF editing tool. That app disappeared pretty quickly though. I suspect they ran into trouble with Adobe.

Copyright lawyers rule the world!
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Very nice tip. Not around my Mac so can't test. Does it tip only work for images? I would like to combine some pdf files. And can it delete pdf pages? That's the only feature I miss when I stop using adobe acrobat.

its easy to combine pdf files in Preview. One way is to have both files open in separate windows, display the thumbnails in the sidebar, and drag or copy and paste from one to the other. you can also change the order of pages and and delete pages fro thumbnails. You can even create an automator workflow to select the pdfs and then combine them into one.
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Neat. How do you get it to arrange the order of images in the pdf?

view thumbnails, and drag
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Anyone know of a way to create the PDF in B&W so the size isn't gargantuan?

you can file print, then select pdf, this "flattens" the file and makes it very small. but not in black and white.

if you really want that, select file Export, use "quartz filter" to select Black and White
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I wrote a native MacOS app in Swift that does the same! Was a fun project. Workflow is much simpler if all you want to do it convert images to a PDF.

Search Concat in Mac App Store (sorry on phone and cannot provide link)

Sounds fun. I wrote an Automator Action, that I also save as a service to Preview. This program annotates widgets (example was forms using fillable fields). It has multiple modes. Reset to clear widgets, index to number the widgets, import to load widgets from csv, and paste to paste widgets from Numbers (I guess could also be Excel or others too). Very fun, contact me if you want code, I also aim to post on GitHub. Love to see someone pick it up and go commercial
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Very timely for me. I have been trying to do this from my Win machine, but the resulting PDF is too large for email. Does anyone know if Preview will compress the images or resulting PDF to a manageable size?

Also, is there an equivalent workflow in iOS? My source images are all pictures taken from my iPhone. Would be a huge timesaver to dump them into a single PDF for sharing by email on my iPhone.


Many ways to compress pdfs. "Flatten", by file print, then select PDF. file Export, choose format, save as images. Automator to compress images.

iOS: https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-pdf-manager-editor-ipad/. this reviews many PDF editor apps. I personally used PDF Expert by Readle - excellent app.
 

SteveJUAE

macrumors 601
Aug 14, 2015
4,408
4,611
Land of Smiles
Also, is there an equivalent workflow in iOS? My source images are all pictures taken from my iPhone. Would be a huge timesaver to dump them into a single PDF for sharing by email on my iPhone.

There is an Adobe app (Adobe Scans) for this on IOS or Android that will convert picture etc to a pdf file and you can crop, adjust, re-order and even change to B&W or use your camera directly

https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acr...LL-ACOM-201801*All*IPM*MVT*Var2*DynTL*TG1*PPT

There is also a fill out forms App,

You do not even need to go near your Mac/Preview to perform these simple tasks, it can be done on most smartphones :D
 
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IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
Copyright lawyers rule the world!

The rights on PDF are complicated. At some point early-on, Adobe released a subset of the PDF spec as open source, presumably to encourage its wide adoption. My understanding is Apple used that code for Quartz. I guess somewhere along the line Apple overstepped the open source part and ran afoul of Adobe's copyright. Too bad. I remember Steve demonstrating that app at a MacWorld Expo, probably in 2000.

Some may also remember that NeXTStep ran Display Postscript. Evidently Steve did not want to get into a licensing deal with Adobe on OS X so they went with their derivative, Quartz.
 

Eric5h5

macrumors 68020
Dec 9, 2004
2,489
590
I'm not sure about that. This went around the Trolliverse awhile back, and came back as not true. Many people are using Preview with no problems at all.
I do know they introduced a bug in Sierra where PDFs made by Pages that had broken bookmarks failed to render properly, where the resolution got worse the more you scrolled down. I suppose you could say that the fault is the borked bookmarks, but previous versions of Preview didn't have any problems, plus that's a really weird bug.

--Eric
 

jagooch

macrumors 6502a
Jul 17, 2009
780
236
Denver, co
This saved my life. Well, maybe not but it made my life easier converting png's to pdf's to then fax to the IRS. I think Bank Mortgage's divisions and the IRS are the only thing keeping Fax technology alive.
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There is an Adobe app (Adobe Scans) for this on IOS or Android that will convert picture etc to a pdf file and you can crop, adjust, re-order and even change to B&W or use your camera directly

https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acr...LL-ACOM-201801*All*IPM*MVT*Var2*DynTL*TG1*PPT

There is also a fill out forms App,

You do not even need to go near your Mac/Preview to perform these simple tasks, it can be done on most smartphones :D
Recommending someone use an Abobe product is like recommending to someone they should jump off a bridge. Don't do it!
 
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