[donatj]

I came here to say how spoiled we are as Mac users. Preview is genuinely the best PDF reader. Full stop.

Unchallenged, and for something like 20 plus years running.

[bee_rider]

I’m convinced it is impossible to do better than Evince, I’ve never found any deficiency or lacking feature in the program.

But, if you think Preview is similarly perfect—maybe we should just come to the conclusion that PDF readers are in a pretty good state.

Which makes Acrobat so confusing.

[unmole]

> I’m convinced it is impossible to do better than Evince, I’ve never found any deficiency or lacking feature in the program.

For me, Evince fails to accurately show the physical paper size. Okular manages to do this just fine.

[dunham]

Yeah, I've been very happy with it over the years. But my one minor nit-pick is that it uses a _lot_ of memory. I presume it is pre-rendering stuff for speed.

On iPhone and iPad I've been using Notability.

[hollerith]

Interesting. I personally never liked Preview. No way to configure it to open maximized, so every time I open a Preview window, I have to maximize it manually.

[kstrauser]

But... why?

Anyway, you're on a Mac. Fix it yourself. Run the Shortcuts app and create a shortcut called something like "Maximize Preview". Set it to run an AppleScript:

  on run {input, parameters}
    tell application "Preview" to activate
    tell application "System Events" to set value of attribute "AXFullScreen" of front window of (first process whose frontmost is true) to true
    return input
  end run

(Download that from https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/96b7c0fef90a408ba3c3bcaedfb... if you trust me — which you probably shouldn't — and you don't want to type it in.)

Now in Shortcuts create an automation that runs when Preview is opened, and select that shortcut you just created as its action. You may have to go into System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and let Shortcuts and siriactionsd access to control your desktop.

Basically, you're doing something very uncommon for a Mac desktop, so it's not going to help you with that by default. It doesn't mean you're powerless to change it, though!

[hollerith]

Thanks. Will give that a try.

[kstrauser]

Did it work? I’m dying of curiosity!

[hollerith]

I don't have a Mac: I've had Macs in the past and plan to get another soon.

My "will give that a try" means that I put a link to your comment on a to-do list.

[kstrauser]

I demand instant gratification, darn it!

Heh, gotcha. I do hope it helps, though! Shortcuts is astoundingly powerful and I’ve used it for any number of personal nits like this. For example, combine it with Keyboard Maestro and you can add new commands to any app that’s scriptable via Shortcuts, like “if the current app is Notes, and I press F5, copy the current note and post its contents to Mastodon”, or whatever.

[array_key_first]

Personally I think okular is better.