Preview App For Mac Os

Preview
Operating system	macOS
Website	support.apple.com/guide/preview/welcome/mac

Fill out and sign forms right on your Mac. Preview supports a large set of image file types, including JPEG, PNG, PSD, and TIFF. When you receive a photo that you can’t open in your photo editing app, you may be able to convert it to a file type you can use. How to convert graphics file types. To browse the Preview User Guide, click Table.
Mac App Store is the simplest way to find and download apps for your Mac. To download apps from the Mac App Store, you need a Mac with OS X 10.6.6 or later.

The Mac Preview app has long included the ability to digitally sign documents with a signature, but up until the most recent versions of Mac OS X, users had to basically sign a piece of paper and then use the Macs front-facing camera to ‘scan’ and digitize the signature. That has changed with modern releases.

macOS
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From version 10.0 to version 10.15: From version 11.0:
iTunes (history) Safari (version history)

Preview is the vendor-supplied image viewer and PDF viewer of the macOS operating system. In addition to viewing and printing digital images and Portable Document Format (PDF) files, it can also edit these media types. It employs the Aqua graphical user interface, the Quartz graphics layer, and the ImageIO and Core Image frameworks.

History[edit]

Like macOS, Preview originated in the NeXTSTEP operating system by NeXT,^[1]^[2] where it was part of every release since 1989.

Supported file types[edit]

Preview can open the following file types:

AI – Adobe Illustrator Artwork files (if PDF content included in file)
BMP – Windows Bitmap files
CR2 – RAW Image file used by Canon Cameras
DAE – Collada 3D files
DNG – Digital Negative files
EPS – Encapsulated PostScript files (after an automatic conversion to PDF)
FAX – faxes
FPX – FlashPix files
GIF – Graphics Interchange Format files
HDR – High Dynamic Range Image files
ICNS – Apple Icon Image files
ICO – Windows icon files
JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group files
JPEG 2000 – JPEG 2000 files
OBJ – Wavefront 3D file
OpenEXR – OpenEXR files
PDF – Portable Document Format version 1.5 + some additional features
PICT – QuickDraw image files
PNG – Portable Network Graphics files
PPM – Netpbm Color Image files
PNTG – MacPaint Bitmap Graphic files
PPT – PowerPoint files
PS – Adobe PostScript files (after an automatic conversion to PDF)
PSD – Adobe Photoshop files
QTIF – QuickTime image files
RAD – Radiance 3D Scene Description files
RAW – Raw image files
SGI – Silicon Graphics Image files
STL – STereoLithography 3D format
TGA – TARGA image files
TIF (TIFF) – Tagged Image File Format files
XBM – X BitMap files

The version of Preview included with OS X 10.3 (Panther) could play animated GIF images, for which an optional button could be added to the toolbar. As of OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Preview lost playback functionality and animated GIF files are display as individual frames in a numbered sequence.^[3]^[4]

Features[edit]

Editing PDF documents[edit]

Preview can encrypt PDF documents, and restrict their use; for example, it is possible to save an encrypted PDF so that a password is required to copy data from the document, or to print it. However, encrypted PDFs cannot be edited further, so the original author should always keep an unencrypted version.

App For Mac Os X

Some features which are otherwise only available in professional PDF editing software are provided by Preview: It is possible to extract single pages out of multi-page documents (e.g. PDF files), sort pages, and drag & drop single or multiple pages between several opened multi-page documents, or into other applications, such as attaching to an opened email message.

Editing images[edit]

Preview offers basic image correction tools using Core Image processing technology implemented in macOS, and other features like shape extraction, color extraction, cropping, and rotation tools. When annotating images, Preview uses vector shapes and text until the image is rasterized to JPEG, PNG or another bitmap format. PDF and image documents can also be supplied with keywords, and are then automatically indexed using macOS's system-wide Spotlight search engine.

Import and export[edit]

Preview can directly access image scanners supported by macOS and import images from the scanner. Preview can convert between image formats; it can export to BMP, JP2, JPEG, PDF, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF. Using macOS's print engine (based on CUPS) it is also possible to 'print into' a Postscript file, a PDF-X file or directly save the file in iPhoto, for example scanned photos.

Beginning with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Preview restricts the Format option popup menu in the Save As dialog to commonly used types. It is possible to access the full format list by holding down the Option key when clicking the Format popup menu.^[5] (GIF, ICNS, JPEG, JPEG-2000, Microsoft BMP, Microsoft Icon, OpenEXR, PDF, Photoshop, PNG, SGI, TGA, TIFF)

New features in Version 7[edit]

Preview 7.0 screenshot

A new 'edit button' where the picture can be edited is introduced in Version 7. The 'edit button' allows options to insert shapes, lines, do cropping, and among other things.

Issues[edit]

As of OS X 10.9.2, Preview does not support ISO-standardized PDF (ISO 32000), and when saving, destroys aspects of PDF files without warning to the user.^[6]^{[needs update]}

References[edit]

^NeXTSTEP promotional brochure from 1995.
^'The many superpowers of Apple's Preview app: Part 1'. Macworld. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
^Use Preview to play animated GIFs
^Preview for Mac: View animated GIF files in Preview
^'Convert Images in Mac OS X: JPG to GIF, PSD to JPG, GIF to JPG, BMP to JPG, PNG to PDF, and more'. OS X Daily. 2010-01-24. Retrieved 2017-01-08.
^Johnson, Duff (7 April 2014). 'Apple's Preview: Still not safe for work'. Duff Johnson Strategy & Communications. Retrieved 18 July 2020.

External links[edit]

Using Preview On Mac

AppleInsider review from 2003
MacProNews article: PDF and Panther: The Hidden Role of PDF in Mac OS X 10.3 from July 2004
Sams Publishing sample chapter on Preview from Mac OS X Panther Applications and Utilities. Includes some instructions for use, with screenshots.