Preview, Mac OS X’s PDF/image viewer, has always been kind of an iffy subject and its fate has been uncertain. When Panther was released, Preview was hailed as the fastest PDF reader on the market, but it still was a bit clunky, and for me, personally, the relatively recent release of Adobe Reader 8 persuaded me to make that my default PDF reader.

However, Preview in Mac OS X Leopard has been greatly enhanced with a significant number of new and enhanced features which really define it as a serious PDF reader, and also brings a few tricks up its sleeve that formerly have only been available to PDF consumers after the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro. So what’s new? Let’s take a look.

I’ll start by looking at Preview as a PDF viewer. For one thing, Preview has seen a much nicer interface, and one thing that I like about it is it actually starts you out by being zoomed into a more reasonable level. Preview adopts a new toolbar that starts Mail-style buttons (why they refuse to use the better-looking Finder and Safari style buttons in Mail and Preview, I’ll never know). The old drawer is now gone, replaced by a cleaner sidebar that can be toggled via a toolbar button. The search field is now in the toolbar, and the search field provides a drop-down listing your recent searches. If you highlight each search result in the sidebar, the resulting entry will pop up with a yellow box, similar to the new search in Safari. The sidebar can also be switched between pages, table of contents, and annotations (see below) via a menu at the bottom, and on the pages view, a slider lets you increase or decrease the size of the pages thumbnails. Scrolling through PDFs is also much much nicer now, and Apple’s website explains that Preview uses Core Animation now to facilitate the beautiful scrolling (”scrolls like butter”, right Steve?*).

But what’s really awesome with Preview in Leopard is that you don’t just get to see your PDF, but Preview actually lets you make changes to it. And that’s not just filling in forms, you literally get to do some of the cool things that folks had to buy Acrobat Professional to do before. For one thing, Preview lets you totally reorganize the PDF that you’re reading. You can reorder pages by dragging and dropping them in the sidebar. Or, remove a page entirely, or add a new blank page. And, Preview adds true annotations, which is the ability to mark up a PDF. You can get to Annotations via the tools menu, although I would recommend customizing your toolbar and adding the Annotate and Mark Up buttons up there. Then, you can easily add an oval, a rectangle, a note, or a link to the page.

Adding an oval or rectangle is fairly self-explanatory, although iWork users will notice some subtle changes in behavior (for example, you must be in Text mode to change annotations, you have to double-click them to select them, and you can only resize them via the lower-right hand corner, similar to resizing a window. Adding a note institutes an appearance similar to the Track Changes feature in iWork. You get a little yellow speech bubble to place somewhere on the page, and a note will appear in a column on the left which you can type in. (I tried viewing a PDF with this annotation in Adobe Reader, and it showed the yellow speech bubble which popped up the note above it.) Or, you can annotate a link by dragging an area to make linkable and specifying a URL. Preview’s new Inspector window lets you specify the various attributes of your annotations to your heart’s content. In the Mark Up section, Preview lets you add highlight, strike thru, or underline to selected text.

Preview doesn’t make Acrobat obsolete, however. You cannot edit the existing content in PDFs, or do other fancy things like that. However, these features are really useful for situations where you need to proof a PDF document, or just point certain things out, and it’s really nice to see Apple bringing these innovations to their PDF reader.

However, Preview is also an image viewer, and it has had some various image editing capabilities as well, and many of the new features concerning image editing in Preview bring it up to par with the image editing features in iWork ‘08. Indeed, Preview in Leopard brings along much improved cropping, rotating, and resizing than before. There’s a brand new color adjustment palette that gives you all of the image editing controls that iPhoto offers. And, finally, two of the best image editing features from iWork come to Preview: Extract Shape and Instant Alpha. The former allows you to select a specific area of an image to keep (by choosing a shape to select) and automatically exclude the rest. But Instant Alpha, one of those few features that I could practically be engaged to, is the amazing ability to remove a background and make it transparent simply by dragging over it and watching it be removed. It is amazing, and I love that this is now in Preview so that I no longer have to send images over to my Photoshopping friends to get their backgrounds removed.

But it gets even better: Preview has a powerful new image size adjustment tool. Go to the Tools menu and select Adjust Size, and a sheet comes down that lets you specify width, height, and resolution, and you can adjust the units of those measurements to fit your needs via the drop-down menu. If you select the Resample Image option, Preview will resample your image with your new settings. This is a great way to, for example, reduce the detail of an image in order to reduce the image size, and Preview shows you in advance how big the file will be and what the new dimensions will be (as a percentage of the original dimensions).

Preview also supports much better image printing, which lets you finally print multiple images on a page. If your image has embedded GPS metadata, Preview will let you see that information, and you can even open the location in Google Maps. (Annotations also work on images, albeit only the rectangle and oval options.) And, of course, once you’ve tweaked your images to your heart’s content, Preview offers built-in export to iPhoto or Aperture.

All in all, Preview packs a one-two punch with its extraordinary wealth of new features that make both PDF and image viewing and editing better, and bring along a number of very useful new innovations that you really can’t find very easily in many other free image/PDF editors. If you are one of the many people (like me) who have stereotyped Preview as one of the insignificant apps in Mac OS X based on your older experiences with Preview, you need to throw that stereotype away because the new Preview is filled with things to make anyone who works with PDFs and images sing its praises.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

* At the special event that I’m quoting, Steve Jobs did correct his strange statement by indicating that he meant to say “scrolls like a hot knife through butter.”

Tags: editing, features, images, iWork, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, PDFs, preview, review, viewing