Formatting in Preview?

You cannot justify the original PDF text in Preview as it is not a PDF Editor. If you open a Pages document in Preview, it is a read-only document without Pages toolbar items. If you require editing the original text in a PDF, then you do need a PDF Editor. Acrobat 8.0 is years out of date for macOS Monterey. The markup Style tool in Preview will only work on inserted text annotations.

There is a Pages User Guide for Mac and a Preview User Guide for Mac. Entirely different applications and purposes.

R_55a wrote:

I cannot figure out how to justify text in Preview.  

Apple’s instructions at https://support.apple.com/guide/pages/align-and-justify-text-tanafea6d099/mac tell me to, e.g., show page thumbnails.  Doing so is supposed produce the Format icon in the Preview toolbar.

I did.  Preview does not show the Format icon in the toolbar:

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/47d90fb1-e2d1-4b6c-b0d1-59e90058e47e

Nor do I see the Document icon as pictured at the Apple instructional webpage.

I can open Text Style tool in the tool bar:

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/c6272c8e-f314-4180-b20c-81ecb7d9317d

But the Text Style tool has no effect on the PDF that I am trying to work on.  In this PDF I click on the cells of the document.  I get no response to any of my attempts to format my text.  I have tried with both the text that I have already placed into the PDF and with blank cells into which I type new text.  The settings remain at 13 point, center-justified text.

I suppose that maybe this is another document that does not cooperate with Preview.  The instructions to this document say that I need Acrobat 8.0 or higher in order to use an auto-calculating feature.  If I needed the auto-calculator, I would go to Acrobat.  But, for now, I am trying to get Preview to work.  And Preview is not showing the functions described in Apple’s website.  

What am I missing?

Maybe a true PDF editor..(?) like:

PDFpen

pdfExpert

etc

Better off before you lock in a PDF (portable document file) format—

TextEdit User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

Pages User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

The article you refer to is for the Apple app Pages. However, it appears that you are trying to do a lot of editing of PDFs in Preview, which is different that Pages and provides limiting editing of PDFs.

To do what you want you need a real PDF editor. There are ones beside the paid Acrobat but those usually cost too for real editing of PDFs.

It may have been a scanned PDF, and the content was an image that a PDF Editor cannot edit, but may be able to OCR into text. If you have MS Word v16.31 or later, and this is not a scanned PDF, then you can open the PDF in Word and convert it into a Word .docx file. Just say no to copy/paste from the PDF.

What am I missing?

Preview is not an editor.

You can add a text annotation, but that doesn't alter the PDF except put some overlay on top of the image.