Yesterday, I tried to fill out a PDF on a MacOS laptop. It was very rough.
I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".
This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.
But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.
Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.
It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.
So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.
PDF editing hasn't changed, it's just that some PDFs have text fields while others don't. It's also possible that Preview isn't compatible with all PDFs' text fields, idk. That "text" button was always there as a fallback.
Oh ok. I'm not sure about the undo thing, but the behavior of a placeholder "text" box appearing in a random spot has always annoyed me, and it's felt hard to resize. That's not new.
Semi new thing is the removal of proper "save as" in Preview and other 1P apps starting in Lion. Still sucks and still hasn't caught on in 3P apps.
lynndotpy · · focus · HN ↗
I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".
This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.
But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.
Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.
It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.
So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
lynndotpy · · focus · HN ↗
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
Semi new thing is the removal of proper "save as" in Preview and other 1P apps starting in Lion. Still sucks and still hasn't caught on in 3P apps.