Converting a PDF to a png? Why? Maybe IrfanView could do that, it's what I've been using on Windows for any conversion since ACDSee went out of fashion...
I've never seen a GUI tool that works as flawlessly as pdftk. Yes, it's CLI, but it works better than anything I ever encountered.
Screenshots? You just need to find the right app, I'm not happy with the windows thing (I've been using Greenshot for a while and it's on par with whatever I use on Linux).
But yeah, my comparison is only Windows, I've never owned a mac. And maybe I'm on the completely other end of the spectrum in my perception of what "normal tasks" are.
Takes all of ~15 seconds. Don't see how that equates to moving mountains.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe all the office work I've done in my life is simply different.
And I have no idea how to make a pdf on this computer. Combine multiple images? I don't even know why I would do that. Much less how.
My favorite battle recently was just trying to shutdown the machine without it starting right back up. Pretty sure that isn't possible if you have external monitor and keyboard hooked up. Which took me several shutdowns to realize.
Re: make a .pdf, just about every print dialogue has had a "print to PDF" for as long as I've been using OS X and now MacOS.
Shut down: Apple Menu > Shut Down (since ~2001)
Print to PDF: File > Print... > PDF > Save as PDF (since ~2001); some apps have an File > Export... menu item as well
Combine multiple images: Photoshop (or image editing app of your choice, e.g. Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity, Krita, etc.; since ~1990)
Screen shot: command-shift-3 (entire screen) or command-shift-4 (selection/window), (since 1990s; earlier for print screen; Mojave or later for command-shift-5); discoverable/configurable via System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Screenshots; modern macOS also pops up a thumbnail you can click on
I also clearly knew how to do a screenshot. But once you have set it to go to clipboard, command shift 4 will silently do that from now on. And I am not at all clear on how I would discover to change that.
And the pdf claim was with preview, not another app.
Worse, though, I could write a very similar rebuttal for any computer in this vein. If you know how things work, discovering is not hard.
I don't fully understand the task you were trying to complete, but Preview is not an image editor so I don't think it can do what Photoshop (or other image editors) can do. It can however combine multiple PDFs into a single document by drag-and-drop, and this is documented in Preview > Help.
I was trying to say something that is perhaps a bit more nuanced than "it's easy once you know how to do it" or even "it's easy to find once you know where to look" – specifically, the Mac UI was originally intended to be fairly discoverable by exploration (and relatively clearly documented), and although some of this has been lost due to iOS-ification, much of it still is:
1. Menu items such as Shut Down are easily discoverable (but in your case it didn't work, perhaps due to an external keyboard turning the system on.)
2. Export to PDF is very discoverable, but isn't universal; print to PDF is discoverable, and is documented in macOS Help, but is perhaps more subtle than it should be because it's in the Print... dialog. I suspect its location there is due to historical and implementation reasons rather than testing users who are unfamiliar with the system. "Preview" after all is named as a "print preview" application rather than a "PDF viewer" app.
3. Screenshots are discoverable by searching for "screenshot" in System Preferences or macOS Help. If you forget the keyboard shortcut it's in a fairly logical place: Keyboard > Shortcuts.
4. On macOS, the Help menu is contextual based on the current active application. Overall system help, titled "macOS Help", is located in the Finder's Help menu. This is perhaps a bit subtle for Windows users who may not know what the Finder is (it's like Windows' File Explorer) and might not realize that the Help menu is contextual. There are "macOS Help" entries for each of these tasks, but you need to know to look in "macOS Help".
While much of the macOS UI is still fairly logical, discoverable, documented, and consistent over many releases, that doesn't mean that a Windows (or Ubuntu) user will instantly know how to use it without learning some important design differences, or vice-versa. The good news is that once you learn them they're fairly consistent across the system.
An interesting point that you might be suggesting which I definitely agree with is that even after 40+ years of development, traditional desktop GUIs can still be greatly improved even without changing their fundamental design.
Apple Menu -> Shutdown. Make sure you don't have the "restart" checkbox ticked.
Works fine on my MBP with external monitor and keyboard
I can try to reproduce later. This was maddening when I was getting ready for a vacation recently. Machine just wouldn't stay off.
Mayhap it is the USB dongle I have that does power and monitor/keyboard?
Preview let’s you create a PDF pretty easily?
No idea what’s going on with your restart issue tho.
Not clear how to use preview to make a pdf with multiple images. I'm guessing that is something that is easy if you have to do it often? I'd probably reach for html or word. Probably word, first.
You can combine entire PDF documents this way, either dragging them from a Finder window or dragging the title bar icon from an open document.
You can also drag and drop thumbnails between open PDF documents in Preview, and you can create a new document from the clipboard if needed using File > New from Clipboard. (Note if you want to drag other pages into it you will need to save it as a PDF first.)
Shift + CMD + 3/4/5 = Screenshot goes to desktop
CTRL + Shift + CMD + 3/4/5 = Screenshot to clipboard
I can use Ubuntu, for instance, perfectly fine for web-dev. It's great.
But in the end, I'm just fighting it.
The UI/UX on todays Ubuntu and apps isn't as good as macOS was 10 years ago!
And yes, I know there are other Distros and I can customise KDE and Gnome and so on. But they are all offer a very shallow user experience.
I wish the Linux GUI and App landscape looked better!
idk with KDE this seems to work ? I hit screen capture and spectacle shows up and saves it to images.
not want to sound harsh, but imgemagick could do that 15 years ago.
I use OpenOffice Draw nowadays, but despite the fact that PDFs have become a joke of a file format, Linux is the best to handle them by far, unless someone thinks that Acrobat is anywhere near to being good (or Preview for that matter)
Quality and simple tools do exist if you look for them:
- Image viewer: feh
- Screen capture: scrot
- Dropbox: Syncthing
- Converters: Pandoc, ImageMagick
- PDF viewer: zathura
- Media player: mpv
etc.
Granted, some of them are CLI only (though they might have GUI wrappers), but desktop users with productivity as the main goal should learn to use and not fear the terminal, instead of settling for whatever their popular brand of distro decided to package for them.
scrot -a $(slop -f '%x,%y,%w,%h')
Nothing about the UI telling me how or where these things were saved. It confused me coming from Ubuntu a lot :)
It's too much hassle when two slightly more advanced tools can cover all of those usecases.
And don't get me started on mac's screenshots which are saved in 12h time in the name, so your 1pm screenshot is before your 11am screenshot and there's no configuration option for it.
Sorry, I should've used a different word - you can't "expand" the image - i.e. make the size larger and keep the picture in a specific place, so that there's more space for annotation on a side. (or I'm missing the option?)
> Preview > Export > JPEG > compression slider
That's recompressing (losing the quality in the process) not optimizing compression. You can't update the compression settings on a png for example.
Edit: also, I bet doing an rclone mount of your Dropbox will be pretty seamless and stable, havent tested this personally though [2].
If you don't like the command line interfaces, then yeah you are probably better off with a Mac.
>Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.
But I don't really know what to say: I very much do prefer the cli! Even if it takes some trial and error, finding the right script that does exactly what you want gives you a reproducible and concise record of your alterations, so if you are in a position where you need to make, say, 100 images with similar annotations, possibly from a csv file or something, you can just do it! Also, it's lightweight, it's a comprehensible process, you know exactly what you are doing, rather than in some alienated userspace where you can never be sure.
I won't argue anyone "wants to", but I know what I want I think!
Pinta [1] is a lightweight MS Paint type program with broad support and a BSD license. It just works.
It seems out of whack to complain about linux without investing a wee bit of time with cli.
but it's not the car's fault if people don't want to use keys to start them up.
anyway, there's a huge amount of GUI software to handle PDFs in Linux, I will say that Linux gives you the most options, either as free software and close source ones.
Hell Acrobat is gold on WineHQ!
But for those who do have the patience and understanding for the shell and man pages, well they can become more powerful than the other Oses combined!
What the hell is “Contact Sheet” and why should I have to care about this jargon?
> And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.
This is how I see macOS. I've used it at work for 3 years now, and it still gets in my way every day.
I accept that some people like it, but it's very much not for me. (I suppose I “think differently” from Apple's designers.)
convert bla.pdf bla.png
convert *.png output.pdfIt's gotta on some level be at least apples/oranges right? You describe a process with more steps, that involves launching a GUI app to do one thing. Maybe its more intuitive, but I would argue the interface makes the user, not the other way around.
I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.
Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff.
Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.
Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app.
The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop.
And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser.
But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful.
Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way.
I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things.
Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone.
And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.