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.
Honestly I think you're just doing it wrong. Messing with PDF's is probably one of the coolest built in features I know of, and with Markup etc in Preview it's super easy.
Be careful of PDF's with built in broken fields though, in which case I just add a text field on top if it's easier.
You see this pattern a lot around Apple users where they insist there simply can't be bugs in Apple software. It's really counterproductive and it's part of the "crazymaking" element of interacting with Apple software and Apple's fanbase.
There should be nothing "wrong" I can do which makes text disappear which can't be undone, or where the click-and-drag targets are as tiny as can be.
The program is buggy. Apple releases bad software sometimes. That is simply all there is to it.
You said "mouse", is it a gaming mouse? Is it configured to issue a bazillion clicks if you press and hold "left" button - for a stupidly small number of ms, taking no consideration of you if you are playing a game? Does it also send "wiggler" (WASD) keyboard presses at the same time? Either of these will ruin any chance of you doing "undo", unless you also "undo" a bazillion times. This behavior will likely make a lot of other things behave in quite weird ways and be "slow" to respond. If you've got a gaming mouse doing auto-clicks, auto-kbd strokes for non-game apps, then the UI designed for humans is going to behave weirdly.
FWIW, the placeholder text can never really disappear, if you remove it all, you get the placeholder "Text" back again. You can replace it with a single space, but that also has a hit zone of more than 1px both H & V. Maybe you have found a bug. I do think there are issues with font background / foreground colour selection that might make it "invisible", but the hit zone will still be there.
I use an ancient mouse, "Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 1000" and an Apple Trackpad. I cannot reproduce what you describe.
What mouse are you using? What additional HID (Mouse, KBD) extensions do you have installed?
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.
sgt · · focus · HN ↗
Be careful of PDF's with built in broken fields though, in which case I just add a text field on top if it's easier.
lynndotpy · · focus · HN ↗
There should be nothing "wrong" I can do which makes text disappear which can't be undone, or where the click-and-drag targets are as tiny as can be.
The program is buggy. Apple releases bad software sometimes. That is simply all there is to it.
VogonPoetry · · focus · HN ↗
You said "mouse", is it a gaming mouse? Is it configured to issue a bazillion clicks if you press and hold "left" button - for a stupidly small number of ms, taking no consideration of you if you are playing a game? Does it also send "wiggler" (WASD) keyboard presses at the same time? Either of these will ruin any chance of you doing "undo", unless you also "undo" a bazillion times. This behavior will likely make a lot of other things behave in quite weird ways and be "slow" to respond. If you've got a gaming mouse doing auto-clicks, auto-kbd strokes for non-game apps, then the UI designed for humans is going to behave weirdly.
FWIW, the placeholder text can never really disappear, if you remove it all, you get the placeholder "Text" back again. You can replace it with a single space, but that also has a hit zone of more than 1px both H & V. Maybe you have found a bug. I do think there are issues with font background / foreground colour selection that might make it "invisible", but the hit zone will still be there.
I use an ancient mouse, "Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 1000" and an Apple Trackpad. I cannot reproduce what you describe.
What mouse are you using? What additional HID (Mouse, KBD) extensions do you have installed?
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗