I dunno, Preview seems entirely fine to me. I use it constantly.
The entire description of the "fall" described in the link is:
> Since those heady days, Preview has been relatively neglected. Revision of both the Quartz PDF engine and its API brought a spate of bugs that only abated with macOS Sierra. Preview has adopted an uncommon model for PDF annotations that doesn’t work well with other PDF products. Then, in macOS Ventura, Apple removed all support for EPS and PostScript conversion, most probably as a result of ongoing security concerns, and their progressive disuse.
I haven't noticed bugs, annotations seem fine, and EPS/Postscript conversion isn't really about Preview at all.
Sure Preview hasn't been gaining tons of features, but it's a pretty mature app that arguably doesn't really need much else.
If you annotate PDFs in Preview it is very common to find that they disappear when the PDF is shared with someone else (e.g. when giving feedback on a document), or even when it’s reopened in Preview in the future. Frequent inexplicable data loss is not great.
But indeed, as a pure reader, Preview remains mostly fine.
I have found this issue. We run into problems when we have to upload the pdf to software that performs OCR, the annotated text does not get picked up. To fix this, in Preview we have to export the file as a PDF
Same experience here.
Preview, if anything, always felt like the simplest true to Apple: 'it just works' kind of PDF/file viewer.
I am not sure what new features it needs, other than some general improvement to the markup tools.
Not much of an article. The "fall from grace has been a slow descent" is explained only with the removal of PostScript support, which the author justifies, and oddly behaving annotations.
I'm pretty sure the author is wishing Preview would receive certain new features, i.e. Apple's neglect is preventing the app from improving. Not sure what those features could be, though.
if memory serves, Display Postscript was a cornerstone of the NeXTStep OS until they figured out that (i) it was dog slow even on an i386 and (ii) Warnock and Adobe wanted a fat share of the pie
i wonder if modern M4 level machines would have been better off with a proper pdf style rendering language than whatever display libs they use today
The entire description of the "fall" described in the link is:
> Since those heady days, Preview has been relatively neglected. Revision of both the Quartz PDF engine and its API brought a spate of bugs that only abated with macOS Sierra. Preview has adopted an uncommon model for PDF annotations that doesn’t work well with other PDF products. Then, in macOS Ventura, Apple removed all support for EPS and PostScript conversion, most probably as a result of ongoing security concerns, and their progressive disuse.
I haven't noticed bugs, annotations seem fine, and EPS/Postscript conversion isn't really about Preview at all.
Sure Preview hasn't been gaining tons of features, but it's a pretty mature app that arguably doesn't really need much else.