Title mostly says it all. Preview is unironically an incredible piece of software. Between feature set and ease of use, I have yet to come across any FOSS that is comparable. Anyone know of a Linux alternative?
EDIT: Due to popular demand I should explain Preview more. It’s a “fully fledged” PDF editor, but somehow it’s completely different from something like Adobe Acrobat. The way most users will interact with it is as a seemingly very plain image viewer, but if you open a PDF you can add fillable boxes, rearrange pages, split and merge PDFs, etc. I cannot place exactly why it’s workflows feel so much better than something like Acrobat.
Preview is one of the things mac os got right. it’s hard to copy. If you think about it, it does not make sense that a tool called preview that most people use to quickly read pdf (and other) files, is also a lightweight pdf editor, which is often more useful than acrobat or pdfedit or whatever you use.
It’s not logical. no one will make a clone of it.
you’ll have to get used to other tools.
Yeah probably true. I’ve got some hopes for the work being done on running Mac apps on Linux, even tried getting an old version of preview working a while back, with absolutely zero success. The tool I was trying had incredibly limited support for graphical apps.
gnome sushi (installed by default in gnome) handles the press space to preview file. not a fully fledged editor but still miss the thing in plasma.
Same, I wish this was ported to kde. Such a useful feature
From what I read Preview is full suite of PDF reader right? If so Okular by KDE seems like a good alternative.
Okular is absolutely fantastic. The only thing I am missing is image import, to place my signature on PDF forms, and then it’s perfect.
Does anyone know if it has that feature and I’m just too dumb to find it?
It does!
If you want to actually digitally sign you can add a key in your OS and then go to “Tools -> Digitally sign” where you can choose a background image which you then can drag where you want to have it.
If you only want your written signature in there, you can create a stamp for it. Click on the arrow beside “Yellow Highlighter” (or whichever tool you have selected) in the top right corner. Select “Configure Annotations” and hit “Add…”.
Make the type a stamp, give it a name like “Signature” and select an image you want to use. After that save and apply.
You can now select your stamp in the top right corner and place it anywhere by clicking or dragging over the PDF.
As a side note, depending on where you live a written signature in a PDF is meaningless at least in terms of legally binding documents.
OMG you are an absolute legend of a life saver! Thank you so much, I am going to try it out as soon as I get to a computer!
Plus one for Okular. Fantastic app.
Or GNOME Papers https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Incubator/papers (still beta)
I use this too daily (I am a sucker for looks), but hands down Okular is better.
Just to add the noise: I use Sterling pdf which i host and dear god it has so many functions that i never knew existed
Yeah it’s very nice. Also discovered this a few months back. Layout of the website is a bit weird at times on low resolutions, but otherwise it’s great.
May I ask what hardware you have to host this?
I host many other things on that hardware. But it’s a small 1 litre pc. Sterling pdf is eating the least from there. I tried but I cant stop listing what i have. It is a 6 core gen 10 i5 w 32 gb RAM. Proxmox as hypervisor running two Debian VMs. I think I run 30+ services on it but again sterlingPDF is least of my concerns there. If you don’t have the hardware I genuinely believe you can run it locally without any issues or you can run it on a potato
Dolphin has the information panel which is activated by pressing F11. I don’t know what more mac preview does.
It’s odd because I feel like it gets mixed up, very fairly due to its name, with MacOS “QuickLook”, which is the actual file previewing tool, giving a quick peek into a file by hitting ‘space’ with the file selected. Preview is essentially an image editor, but it doubles, or maybe triples, as PDF viewer/editor and scanner importer. The names are kinda silly tbh.
Ah, so not the information panel then. I don’t know of a single application that does image editing, pdf viewing, and scanning. There are applications for all three individually.
Any Linux distro
I’m already running Linux. I’m looking for an application that can run on Linux that roughly matches the feature set of MacOS Preview for image and PDF viewing and basic editing.
It might be helpful if you explained what it is or what it does.
E: honestly not sure why I’m being downvoted for asking what the thing in the OP is…
Very fair, I updated the original post
For PDF is does splitting and merging and rotating pages.
