How can I get rid of Preview's edit panel at the top of the window?

[John Chambers]

This problem just popped up today. I've normally used Preview as a tool for proofreading documents, often 2 or 3 different PDF versions at once. The edit panel not only takes away several lines of text from every Preview window, but it's also very sensitive, interpreting things I don't even know I've done as edit commands, messing up the doc I'm proofreading and blocking what I'm trying to do.

I looked around in this and a couple of other forums, and got lots of instructions on how to edit docs with Preview, which is exactly what I'm NOT trying to do. There seems to be no clue anywhere I can find to return Preview to the state it had up until this morning, which was just the bare "content" in the window and no other panels (except the title bar, which I think OS X doesn't let you suppress).

I do know about the View menu's "Content Only" choice, and the menu says I have it selected. Selecting it no longer gets rid of the edit panel.

So is this maybe a permanent change from a recent "upgrade"? Am I stuck now with wasting that chunk of screen space that constantly shoots down what I'm trying to use Preview for?

One of the symptoms I've seen a lot today is suddenly the little word "Text" appearing in a doc, with a green background. It can take a while to notice, since it's often on a different page that the one I had on the screen. But I know when it's there, because when I fix a typo and rebuild the PDF file, Preview tells me it won't load it because the document has been changed by another app. Of course it has, and I want Preview to reload it and show me what it looks like on the screen. But when it reaches this state, none of the button choices work, and after a few tries, Preview often crashes. I restart it with the docs I was working on, and continue until it happens again. Are there any clues how to prevent this from happening, or tell Preview "No, I don't want to edit this text."? Or maybe "Just reload the file, dammit!"

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Within Preview, View->Hide Sidebar, View->Hide Toolbar, View->Hide Markup Toolbar. Once the last 2 are selected, they change to "Show Toolbar" and "Show Markup Toolbar". With these, I only have the PDF content showing on my iMac running High Sierra..

 

[John Chambers]

Well, it's been about a month, and I'm still seeing the problem. I understand the suggested View->Hide Edit Toolbar, but the problem is that sometimes the View menu has "Show Edit Toolbar" when the edit toolbar is showing. Clicking on that does nothing, probably because the edit toolbar is already showing. But clicking on it doesn't change the "Show" to "Hide".

And I still haven't spotted anything correlated with this misbehavior. The only thing noticeable is that fairly often, it's followed by the other misbehavior I described: I've spotted a typo in the document, edited the (plain text) source, rebuilt the .pdf file, clicked on the Preview window -- and Preview pops up a complaint that the file has been edited by another program. Of course it has, and I want Preview to reload it as usual so I can proofread my change and the rest of the document. But this is a dead end, because there's no way to get Preview to do anything but complain that the document has changed. The only "solution" seems to be to kill -9 Preview and restart it, which can be really annoying when you have a dozen Preview windows open in three desktops, showing the current forms of all the documents I'm working on.

Both of these strike me as obvious bug in Preview, but maybe I'm just misunderstanding it. Maybe it's not intended to be used for proofreading?

 

[MacInWin]

You got it, John. It's not intended to be used that way. It's a "preview" not an editor. So, if you need to edit a document that is under view in Preview, first close the document window, do the edit, rebuild the pdf and reopen the new document in Preview. Preview is rightfully complaining that a document it is displaying has been modified externally, so the image no longer may match the file. But it won't open the new file unless and until you tell it specifically. You don't need to kill all of Preview, just close the window with the amended document, preferably BEFORE recreating the document from the editor. And I don't think it's a bug, just how the software operates. One good thing is that when you close an open document, then overwrite with the revised pdf, the "Open Recent" list will still have the filename in it, so you won't have to search all over for the revised document if it's a true overwrite of the original.

 

[John Chambers]

Well, yeah, but I'm not trying to treat Preview as an editor. I'm trying to use it for proofreading, which is sometimes also referred to as "previewing", before putting a document online. The editing is done to plain-text source files, which are then combined and fed to a formatter to get the PDF. Preview is seriously slowing the proofreading down by telling me that the file has changed and refusing to reload it. That sorta shoots down the whole concept of preview/proofreading. ;-)

Also, closing the Preview window before doing the formatting results in an even greater slowdown in the task. It means that you have to tell Preview to close and reload the file to check each edit, and it then displays the first page of the document. You then have to scroll down to where you were before, and find the line within the page. It's much more time efficient to just live with the current misbehavior, since it only happens a few times a day, rather than adding all that extra time to every edit/proofread loop. The 95% or so of the time it does do the reload, though it also pops back to the top of the page, sometimes requiring extra time to find your place in the page again.

Guess I'll just have to put up with it. (I do have Adobe Acrobat, but it's even worse than Preview for proofreading, and it wastes a huge amount of screen space with all the whitespace and cruft that it surrounds the content with. I wonder if there's a version of xpdf that runs on OS X. It does the job right, only reloading when you hit ^R, then doing it silently. But so far, I haven't found a linux laptop that can display nearly as much stuff on the screen as my Macbook Pro. ;-)

 

[MacInWin]

Classic situation of "trade off" in software, John. What you are asking for is dynamic updating of what is open in Preview, which it is not designed to provide. Hence, you have to close the document, then reopen it as a new one. You can use the search function to get back to where you were, if there is a word there that is unique enough to only appear a few times in the document. And calling it "misbehavior" implies that it's malfunctioning, which it is not. It's just lacking a feature you would prefer it to have, but which Apple has not implemented (and most likely won't, as your situation is pretty unique). The software is behaving exactly as designed, alerting you that the document you have open has been changed by some outside agent.

In thinking about it, I cannot think of any app that dynamically displays changes in the stored file. To do that would require the displaying software to be constantly monitoring the file system for any change to the open document(s). Most, if not all, such software opens the document and displays it as it exists at the time of opening, not looking back to see if it's been changed since then. Only when you do something to cause it to look (save, close) does it notice that what it opened has changed.

All that said, I did a quick search for xpdf and Mac and got this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/171003/install-xpdf-in-mac-os/171012

Don't know if that would help.