Printing A3 from Preview

Hi,

I share your frustration. Have you resolved the problem?

Oyvind

Yes, the "Crop or Scale" is gone and I miss it a lot. I get a lot of eFaxes with mixed letter/legal sizes and the old Preview was great for that. Now you have to fiddle with page setup and printer options endlessly. (77% or 78%? Oh, forgot to switch default "letter" to "legal". Oh printer options say "scale down only".... etc. etc. etc.)

Are they getting us ready for Intel by turning Preview into a Windows app?????

Preview also takes forever to render thumbnail pages with photos and frequently just freezes up and dies requiring a force quit. (I'm in mortgage business and get a lot of appraisals, faxes, and other docs pdf. If Apple means "business" they need to take off the iPod headphones for a minute and get on the paperless office train).

I'm just so disappointed that with Tiger they made Preview so much worse. For those of us that PDF a lot it's been a step back to the dark ages.

Sorry to rant but I was the envy of windows collegues in the mortgage biz with so many native PDF abilities and by downgrading Preview they really made day to day life a hassle for me.

I've been a Mac user since the 80's and Tiger is the worst upgrade since OS 8.5. Steve needs to crack the whip or Panther will be remembered as the best version of OS X after everyone throws their computers out the window.

My solution:
- trash Preview 3 and install Preview 2.

Oyvind

Ben,

I used to have a problem with viewing/printing A4 PostScript files
using Preview. I expected it to silently scale it down for viewing
but keep it 1:1 for printing.

This did not happen. I was annoyed by the "scale-down or cut-down"
messages and scaling-down applied to printing too, absolutely needlessly.
I could view/print the same files without a hitch on my old Unix
workstation, and I can still print them if I bypass Preview (using lpr -l).
I also had an issue with mixed orientation files (landscape/portrait).

The problem is (as far as PostScript input is concerned) that
in the not-so-distant past PS programmers did not have the means to declare
the page size and orientation up-front of their programs, so it was left
to the viewing program to figure these out before drawing.
Later Adobe added explicit instructions to the language to declare the page:

<< /PageSize [width height] >> setpagedevice

where width and height are in device units (e.g. 595 and 842 for A4).
Now the problem is that though many applications can function in the old
and the new system, Preview only works well in the new.
This will not be a problem in the future when everyone will follow the
new rules, but until then...

One solution is to let the file go through a converter that still functions in both systems but outputs in the new, e.g. Acrobat.
Though landscapes will be drawn 90 degrees rotated, the scaling will be ok.
To get the perfect solution one needs to edit the PS file.
If you have similar problems with non-PS files that are read by Acrobat, it
is worthwhile to try this conversion.

Miklos

I can't believe this feature has been scraped. I work in an architects office and we had made Preview (and its scaling and cropping feature) an integral part of our printing/production process. We produce mainly A1 documents but Preview allowed us to quickly and easily produce A3 scaled down versions for internal use.

I highly recommend that people submit a bug report:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

Here's what i submitted:

Preview: missing scaling and ccropping and A3-to-A4 bug:
I work in an architects office and we had made Preview in Panther, and particurlarly its scaling and cropping feature, an integral part of our production process.
We produce mainly A1 documents and Preview in Panther allowed us to quickly and easily produce A3 scaled down versions for internal use.
We now find that not only does Preview in Tiger not allow us to scale or crop on the fly (without calculating manually) but no matter what the size of the PDF it always scales to the default paper size in System Preferences.
Now I'm in the s**t for upgrading all our systems to Tiger. Please reintroduce the ability to choose crop or scale (even if just as a preference option).