Preview app full screen mode changes default view for PDFs (Known problem for over 10 years)

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Level 1

4 points

Preview app full screen mode changes default view for PDFs (Known problem for over 10 years)

When opening a PDF using MacOS' (Tahoe) Preview app in full screen (or full screen + left/right) it defaults to "two-pages" even tough I set my preference to "continuous scroll". I'm reading a lot of papers so changing this for every PDF gets tedious. I'm aware that there is no option to change that and this is pretty much a duplicate of other complains I found on the internet which are all from different MacOS versions too. So if somebody with the power to change this behavior is able to see this I would be very happy :)

Other threads:

This is not so much a question for the community as I know the easiest fix is

cmd + 1

but more for trying to reach devs. So I am thankful for any tip on how to do this effectively.

Posted on Mar 25, 2026 3:34 PM

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Answer 1

KoniHD Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 25, 2026 4:11 PM in response to KoniHD

Addendum: The binary seems to have a key for

fullscreenPageViewMode

which works in combination with

setFullscreenPageViewMode

and even

userSetFullscreenPageViewMode

Since there exists no GUI for that it seems like this is a deliberate decision not to let users control the setting even though it exists. Unfortunately I still wasn't able to find a way to set the fullscreenPageViewMode.

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