Preview Goodness

Having noted some problems with Tiger’s Preview application in a previous note, it’s time to redress the balance. Preview under Tiger has got some great features. Some have been available in Acrobat reader for a while, but in Preview I get to use them faster!

• The automatic resize option resizes the PDF pages as I change the size of Preview’s window (just like Acrobat reader). No more guessing as I resize and hit zoom to fit.
• Preview now sports two side-by side views: one is two-up, the other emulates a book, ensuring recto pages actually appear on the right. This is critical for doing the layout work for a book.
• The Revert option on the file menu is presumably intended to undo bad changes you’ve made to a file. But is has a great side effect: if you’re looking at a PDF in Preview and update it on disk, hitting Revert loads the new PDF. No more closing and reopening to see the results of an edit.
• Slideshow mode makes the most of screen real estate on the Powerbook. It’s too early to say, but it looks like this could be very useful for reading.

And that’s just the changes I’ve been using while working on the layout for Chad's new book. So thanks to the team at Apple for adding stuff from my wish list. (And if you’re listening, Preview team, I’d really love an overlay-revisions mode, where I could put pages from revisions of a document on top of each other…)