PDFView
I’ve always greatly prefered MacOS X’s Preview PDF viewing application to the bloated mess that is Adobe Reader, but it has a number of irritating features. The first is that I almost always find myself zooming in to a document to increase the font size for comfortable onscreen viewing. However, in Preview, you have to keep hitting the zoom button or shortcut until you get the size you want, then adjust the window size to fill the screen. It often takes quite a bit of manual tweaking before you get the window filling the screen. The preference item PDF > Auto-scale ought to do the trick, but it scales the document to fit a full page on screen, which makes the text much too small to read (for my eyes, anyway). Also, if you want to use Preview to present a LaTeX beamer presentation, you get an annoying ‘onscreen display’ for navigation, which is distracting and a bit unnecessary. Finally, if you use LaTeX it’s inconvenient to use Preview to, well, preview the document, because it doesn’t update the display when you edit and rebuild the PDF.
I’ve just found (via the TextMate mailing list) another application that fixes all those annoyances: PDFView. It’s free and Open Source, it’s fast and it’s very nice to use. The auto-scale feature actually works, and it opens windows by default to fill the screen. There’s a separate ‘Fullscreen’ view for reading without distractions (which shows just the document and scrollbar on a blank background), and ‘Presentation’ view, which fits the full page onscreen without scrollbars, so you can show beamer presentations properly, and it updates automatically when you rebuild a LaTeX PDF file, making it the perfect viewer to use together with TextMate when creating LaTeX files.
I think it says a lot for the quality of PDFView that after only a few minutes of using it, I changed the default application for PDF files from Preview to PDFView.
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Oh. Am I first again?
I agree about Preview, it's a pain. It also opens things I don't want it to, like JPEGs, which I'd rather open in Adobe Elements 4, or at least I think I would, until Elements starts loading, and 5 minutes later when the credit list is down to the janitor's Great-Aunt Mary and her second cousin twice removed, I start hitting Control-Q. Why do Adobe programs take so long to load? Add the fact that mine is an Apple Mac Mini Core Solo, and Elements has not been converted to run under the Intel umberella, and it loads very slowly indeed.
PDF has rather lost its point hasn't it? There are now so many programs that will deconstruct a PDF file it is no longer a secure, unalterable, file transmission protocol, so one can no longer rely on the fact that any PDF one is sent or given hasn't, in fact, been edited.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 17/12/2006 12:33 am • Permalink •
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If you set the document to 'Continuous' rather than 'Single Page' (either in the contextual menu for the document or in Preview's 'View > PDF Display' submenu), the document will be auto-sized to fit the width of the viewport rather than the height.
And, yes, this works for PDFs viewed in Safari.
by scott lewis @ 17/12/2006 1:56 am • Permalink •
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Bless you for bringing this to my attention. I've had precisely the same gripes with preview - unintelligent sizing, no auto-update, the cute but annoying arrows during a beamer presentation.
by Hans Fugal @ 17/12/2006 3:25 pm • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: If you want to change the default application to open a particular file type you can do the following: go to Finder and select a JPEG (or whatever), Get Info on the file (command-I) and select the application you want under 'Open with application', then click 'Change all'. Done. I'm not sure that the main point of PDF was to be uneditable. I thought it was supposed to be a portable format that would look the same on any platform, regardless of which fonts they had installed etc. Hence Portable Document Format. But I could (and probably am) quite wrong.
scott lewis: Hey, I didn't know that! Still PDFView fixes the other problems too, so I'll still use it in preference to Preview.
Hans Fugal: No problem.
by bsag @ 19/12/2006 7:28 pm • Permalink •
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I agree that Adobe's PDF Reader can become annoying for regular PDF reading in its original state. But with a few optimization and tricks it can be a wonderful tool.
by PDF expert @ 16/04/2008 12:34 am • Permalink •
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