Hack 2 Read PDFs with Mac OS X s Preview

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Hack 2 Read PDFs with Mac OS X's Preview

If you have a Macintosh running OS X, the operating system includes a Preview application that enables you to look at PDFs without downloading Acrobat Reader .

Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X, uses PDF all over. Icons and other pieces of applications are PDFs, the rendering system is tied closely to the data model used by PDFs, and any application that can print can also produce PDFs. Given this fondness for PDF, it makes sense that the Preview application Apple provides for examining the contents many different file types also supports PDF.

The Preview application is installed on Macs at Macintosh HD:Applications:Preview . It reads a variety of graphics formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and GIF, as well as (of course) PDF. You can open PDFs in Preview by selecting File Open . . . , by dragging their icons to the Preview application, or (if Acrobat isn't installed) by double-clicking. An open PDF in Preview looks like Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Viewing a PDF document through Mac OS X's Preview application

Preview's overall interface is much simpler than the Acrobat Reader's interface, though the options are friendly and clear. Preview also creates thumbnail images of pages, which is convenient for quick navigation. Preview also supports the PDF-creation functionality built into Mac OS X [Hack #40] .

Also, Preview's File Export . . . command enables you to save the PDFs or graphics you're examining in any of a variety of PDF formats. If you need to convert a JPEG to a PDF file, or a PDF to a TIFF file, it's a convenient option. (It's also worth noting that screenshots taken using Mac OS X's Command-Shift-3 or Command-Shift-4 options are saved to the desktop as PDFs. Those PDFs contain bitmaps, much as if they were created as TIFFs and exported to PDF through Preview.)

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Hack 3 Read PDFs with Ghostscript's GSview

The Ghostscript toolkit for working with PostScript and PDF supports a number of simple viewers , including GSview .

The Ghostscript set of tools (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) is an alternative to a number of Adobe products. At its heart is a PostScript processor, which also works on PDF files.

PostScript is both an ancestor of PDF and a complement to it. PostScript is a programming language focused on describing how pages should be printed, while PDF is more descriptive. You can convert from PostScript to PDF and back. Many printers and typesetting systems handle PostScript, while PDF is more commonly used as a format for exchange between computers.

Although typically you run Ghostscript from the command line or you integrate it with other processes, you can also use it as the rendering engine inside a number of viewers. Ghostview and GV support Unix and VMS, while MacGSview is a viewer for the Macintosh and GSview supports Windows, OS/2, and Linux. You'll need to install Ghostscript [Hack #39] before you install GSview. Once GSview is installed, it can open PostScript, Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), and, of course, PDF, as shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4. Viewing a PDF document through GSview

GSview doesn't provide a lot of bells and whistles. The toolbar across the top offers basic navigation, zoom, and search (the eyes). If you explore the menus , however, you'll find lots of PostScript-oriented utility functions. GSView is a useful tool if you need to work with PostScript and EPS files generally , because it lets you explore these files just as if they were PDFs. GSView is also a useful tool if you have a file that's misbehaving, because it provides a fair amount of detail about errors in PostScript and PDF handling. For many users, it's too stripped down to be useful, but what it lacks in chrome it has in power.

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