share this articleLeopard’s Preview: Can You Throw Away Your Copy of Acrobat Yet?
By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, November 12, 2007 - 10:54:01
Score: 
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has a completely new Preview application, and many of us have been reading about it, and some of us have actually used it. To graphic designers, publishers and document managers, the most interesting about the new Preview is its behaviour. Will its behaviour with images and PDFs let you use it without having to resort to Adobe Acrobat CS3? And the answer is that it may well do, if your needs are modest.
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Leopard’s Preview is blazingly fast. It’s actually faster than Tiger’s Preview, and that one launched documents and images far quicker than any Adobe application. The reason is that Adobe must load all those libraries and modules in order to deliver the power and capabilities they think you may need. Preview, on the other hand, was designed to be a simple viewer of images and PDFs. In Tiger, at least. In Leopard, Preview itself gets muscle that you were used to see in Acrobat, but nowhere else. Adding comments, high-lighting, pages and bookmarks, you can do it with Preview.
Fastest PDF and Image Viewer Around
The first thing that you’ll notice about Preview in Leopard is that it is very fast. Double-click a PDF and Preview will not even bounce once for a brochure with 18 pages and heavily illustrated. The next thing you’ll notice is that the integrated sidebar can be opened to reveal thumbnails of the pages, while the thumbnails themselves can be resized.
The real power of Preview for PDFs lies in the new capabilities. Annotating a PDF is a breeze with the oval, rectangle, note, and link tool. Marking up documents is a matter of selecting the high-lighting tool, underline or strike-through tool. But when you install Leopard none of these tools are readily apparent; you must load them explicitly into the Toolbar by customising the latter --at least when you’re upgrading from Tiger.
I tried the annotation and markup tools and then opened the document in Acrobat CS3 to find that they were all there. In case you’re wondering: I also tested the reverse, and added a stamp to the document and some other comments. When I re-opened the document in Preview, the Stamp was the only annotation that was there but without an editable note.
Encrypting a PDF in Acrobat will now create a document that alerts you to the password in a clear visual manner when opened in Preview. But surprise, surprise: you can also encrypt a PDF in Preview. The encryption command is available when you save the PDF. As with Tiger, you can convert a PDF to a PDF/X.
The bottom-line: on the level of functionality, Preview can replace Acrobat as long as you don’t want to get access to all the goodies and raw power of Acrobat itself. Adobe’s “The Original” still has features and capabilities Preview can only dream of. However, Acrobat is slow as molasses compared to Preview, and I foresee many professional document publishers using Preview whenever they possibly can.
With Preview for PDF, it’s almost like iLife’s iMovie and Final Cut Pro 6: if you want the absolute best quality, you’ll be using Final Cut. If you want to do it fast with pretty much the same quality, but less control over the results, you’ll be using iMovie.
For images, Preview has gained some colour controls, and a very useful Inspector that will show you EXIF, IPTC and other metadata attached to the image. A lot of the power of Core Image is available, right in Preview. Do you want to quickly cut out an object from a scene? Use Instant Alpha and you’ll be ready before Photoshop has even started launching, but beware to use it on not too difficult scenes. Instant Alpha is great, but it doesn’t work --as none of the cut-out tools that I know of, except perhaps Fluid Mask, anyway-- when the object has little colour or contrast difference with the background from which you’re trying to cut it loose.
With oval, lasso or rectangle selections, you can copy the selection to the clipboard and rapidly repurpose the content. And from the sidebar, you can even send the image to iPhoto or Aperture if those applications are on your system.
Will Preview replace Photoshop? It’s a ridiculous question. Will it replace anything else? It might replace everything else for simple manipulations and adjustments. Especially as you can save your image in a large number of formats, including JPEG-2000.
Leopard is great in many respects. Whenever I’m using it, it feels like the technology in that motion picture “Minority Report”. I’m almost expecting the system to react to my hands waving in front of the monitor. Alas, Leopard isn’t that intelligent yet, but its Preview application is a mature tool. It’s covering more than the basics, but it won’t replace the heavy-duty applications of document publishers and image editors yet.
However, it will, wen you’re in a hurry and doing some simple image or PDF editing.
 comment ↓ 11 so far
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Comment Form
Time of Entry: 2007 11 12 UT - by Johnny Turner
If preview had headers/footers and page numbering, I wouldn’t need Acrobat at all anymore.
Time of Entry: 2007 11 17 UT - by Henk Gianotten
You mention that Leopard (and Tiger) can convert PDF to PDF/X. Is it also possible to convert PDF to PDF/A ?
And how about PDF/X to PDF/A ?
Time of Entry: 2007 11 18 UT - by Erik Vlietinck
Leopard’s PDF conversion capabilities are the same as on Tiger, as far as I could see. So, PDF/X, yes. PDF/A: no, and cross-conversion: no way…
Time of Entry: 2007 11 22 UT - by Neil Chapman
I cannot copy and paste portions of a PDF in Leopard’s Preview like I could in Tiger. This is a HUGE downside for me, as I copy and paste key portions of medical records, for example, into word processing documents (Pages) in my law practice.
Now, when I attempt to copy a portion of a PDF, the ENTIRE PAGE is pasted. It’s infuriating.
I can’t figure out what gives.
Time of Entry: 2007 11 23 UT - by Erik Vlietinck
Neil, have you tried dragging the text you want to copy to the desktop? That works for me…
Time of Entry: 2007 11 26 UT - by Neil B. Chapman
Erik,
No, I can’t drag the copy to the desktop. I was in an Apple Store yesterday and spoke to a couple of “geniuses” about it. They acknowledged the problem, but could not offer any workaround. This is a big deal: For example, if you want to copy a signature line on a PDF contract, when you try to paste just the signature line into Pages or Keynote, the whole contract is pasted in. Under Tiger’s Preview, only the signature line (the portion copied) would be pasted. I don’t get why the Leopard Preview even bothers to have a Select tool if it won’t select anything. I don’t understand how you say you can “drag” the text I want to copy to the desktop. In fact, do this: select a small portion of the PDF, then under Preview’s “File” menu choose “New from Clipboard.” Save it to the desktop as a PDF. Then go to a Pages document and drag the little PDF you just created into the Pages document. Instead of pasting the clipboard PDF image, you get the whole (original) PDF. This is not acceptable and doesn’t make sense.
Time of Entry: 2007 11 27 UT - by Erik Vlietinck
Neil,
First of all: I can’t do what you suggest. When I copy a small piece of text from a PDF in Preview, the snippet gets copied to the clipboard, but the File > New from Clipboard doesn’t become selectable.
I don’t use the Select tool, though, but the Text tool. If you do that, you can copy snippets.
The Help file: To copy text, choose Tools > Text Tool. Drag over the text, and then choose Edit > Copy.
With some PDF files, line breaks are not saved when you copy text, so that when you paste the text, the lines all run together.
To copy only a portion of text vertically (for example, to select only one column in a two-column document), choose Tools > Text Tool. Hold the Option key as you select the text, and then choose Edit > Copy.
To select a portion of the page and copy it as a graphic image, choose Tools > Select Tool. Select a portion of the page, and then choose Edit > Copy.
Now, if the latter doesn’t work correctly, this would indeed be a bug. However, I think your problem is solved with what I just recapped, right? Let me know if it isn’t.
Time of Entry: 2007 11 27 UT - by Neil B. Chapman
Erik,
Thanks for the reply. This is strange, because I cannot do what you can do. I’m running Mac OS 10.5.1 Leopard on a spankin’ new iMac with Preview 4.0. I cannot select anything with the Text tool. When I use the Text tool, the arrow on my mouse doesn’t change, and I can’t do anything with it. So, I can’t “drag over the text.” Nothing happens. The Select tool allows me to select, but when I copy, as I say, it copies the entire page when I paste into another application. So the Preview help is wrong, as far as I can tell, about being able to use the Select Tool to copy a portion of the page as a graphic image using Edit > Copy. For me, the problem is not solved using the Text Tool, as it does not allow me to do anything that I can tell.
Time of Entry: 2007 11 28 UT - by Erik Vlietinck
Hi Neil,
I guess Leopard 5.0.1 does have bugs in it, and more than you think. I can select text with the Text tool, you can’t. I can actually do with the Select Tool what you can’t, i.e. select a snippet and have it appear as a snippet in Acrobat Pro 8.
However, I did notice that the Select Tool dims the area that you select. It doesn’t really “crop” or cut the area from the page it’s on. In Pages I therefore get the whole page on which the selected snippet is dragged. In my case, it’s not the complete original PDF --are you sure it is in your case?
In Acrobat I can see that it’s just the page from which the snippet was selected. I agree with you that the appearance of even “only” the whole page in Pages would be a bug, but I’m not sure whether that’s a bug in Preview or in Pages ‘08…
Furthermore, the PDF you’re trying to select text from: is it a secured PDF? If it is, Preview will now correctly honour the security settings and not allow you to do whatever it is the author of the original PDF has been trying to forbid. You can check security by opening the Inspector.
Let me know how you get on with these observations. And thanks for discussing this here. It’s useful for other readers as well.
Time of Entry: 2007 12 19 UT - by meelash
I have the same problem as above. I can select the text in a PDF document but that doesn’t help if I want to select an object like a table. It appears this is a bug with both the new Keynote and Pages since pasting works correctly in textedit.
Time of Entry: 2008 01 22 UT - by Jonas
Neil and Erik,
Working in Preview this morning I came across your problem. I had downloaded a PDF of a newspaper and I wanted to copy several clippings out and save them into a Pages document. Using the selection tool, I could select the article. I could even copy it. However, when I went to paste it into Pages, the entire PDF page was pasted. Copying only the text is out of the question. I want the entire article.
In Adobe this is possible. There is the “snapshot” tool, which allows you to select an area of the PDF, and then it saves it to the clipboard as a jpeg. While you were able to do this in Tiger Preview, Leopard Preview has discontinued this feature. Very annoying. But there is a workaround…
The OS has a built-in “screen capture” tool, which allows you to select only a portion of the screen. So arrange the window so the area you want is fully viewable in the Preview window. Then hold down command(⌘)+shift+4 to call up the snapshot tool (the cursor will turn into crosshairs). Select the area you wanna copy. When you release the mouse, the area will be saved down to the desktop as Picture 1...2...3.... The format is PNG, which is a little weird, but Pages and most other applications can still work with it.
Anyway, this is the best solution I can come up with now. It’s almost as smooth as Adobe’s snapshot tool, but with one extra step. Hopefully Apple will get on the ball with this and fix the “selection” tool for Preview’s PDF functions.
