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Comment by Cockbrand | Hacker News Reader

The same goes for Preview.app - it's a very underrated, super powerful app for PDF editing and lots of other stuff.

All the original apps / utilities in old OSX were surprisingly powerful given their simple interfaces. Network Utility, Image Capture, etc just did the things. I remember pointing out to my father (on his first Mac) that we were eschewing HP's drivers and using what Apple built right into the OS. I don't think it had the impact on him that it had on me.

It arguably gets worse with every OS X iteration. I understand why they removed postscript support, but it still makes me sad.

But it can still do a lot.

My pet peeve is that every single time you click any web link in PDFs, you have to confirm via a dialog that you want to visit a link. You used to just be able to click links.

I’ve never seen that, I use Safari. My nit about PDFs is pages that download the PDF rather than view them within the browser.

For me, it's about 30% of my pdfs just showing blank/white pages... when I drag them to a Firefox tab, they render perfectly. It's Preview, not the pdf that's the problem.

It's been screwed up since Lion I think, if that was the one where they played with the idea of "people don't have to save anymore", still decent but has some dumb bits of friction in the main flows from the mistakes of that idea.

The iOS version is straight up trash though if you're trying to work with multiple PDFs like bank statements on iOS.

It does have a lot of polish. I'm just a bit sore that it no longer supports PostScript.

Love using it to make white bits transparent. The tool also exists in Keynote but is more powerful in Preview. It's the second tool from the left in the editing toolbar.

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