Preview, the Mac app people forget about

Re:Preview, the Mac app people forget about by MBCook on Monday May 09, 2022 @01:17PM (#31316878)

It’s one of those transformative little features. But it’s especially great in PDFs where it’s not a “real” PDF but just a collection of page sized images so you couldn’t normally select the text before without OCR software of some sort.

Having it built into the OS is so handy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Preview, the Mac app people forget about by dschuessler on Monday May 09, 2022 @03:00PM (#31318297)

I tried it with one of these image-based PDFs and didn't get it to work. Is this Apple-Silicon-only? Or is there any other step you need to do?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Preview, the Mac app people forget about by Tagbert on Monday May 09, 2022 @04:06PM (#31319054)

It is possible that it is AS only. It may use the machine learning components of AS.

Edit: As of July of 2021, Live Text was available in beta on Intel Macs so by the time Monterey shipped it worked on both Intel and AS.

Whether it works on a given document may depend on how that app displays the image. I can see where it would be complicated in a PDF where you may have combinations of text, images, and OCR’d text behind images.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Preview, the Mac app people forget about by MBCook on Monday May 09, 2022 @03:29PM (#31318637)

I’m not going to pretend it works 100% of the time. I don’t know if that’s the issue.

It works with anything that works with Monterey. So if you are running macOS Monterey you fit the requirements.

[ Parent | on HN ]