Yosemite: Preview Won't Manipulate or Merge PDFs

I have exactly the same issue. Although my MacBook Pro is Late 2008, running Yosemite 10.10 on 10-20-14. Every issue that Litag8r has mentioned has also happened to me. I'll let you know if I find a solution, but looks like a glitch that came with the update to Yosemite.

I have the exact same problem. I'm working with a 2013 Air, and it's seriously messing with my studying efficiency (medical student!)

Same issue here in both my Macs: one with 10.10 and the other with pre-release OS X update seed 10.10.1

The principal role of Preview 8 is a PDF viewer with rudimentary markup capability. Apple did not set out to make an Adobe Acrobat Pro, or compete with the myriad of third-party PDF manipulation choices in the OS X App Store.

Although Preview in some past versions of OS X would provide arcane PDF merging, it appears that this capability is now gone.

Rather than waste more unproductive time attempting to make Preview into what it is not, I recommend a closer look at utilities in the App Store that meet your PDF handling requirements.

Like it or not, the so-called new Apple is about design trumping user functionality.

I adored that "arcane PDF merging" capability. I don't want to look for yet another third-party utility in the App Store to do something that was so easy until a few months ago! What is the rationale? No one complained when it was possible to simply drag-and-drop pages into pdf documents: why do you say now that this is attempting to make Preview into what it is not?

Hello!

I too am having problems with Preview 8.0 in Yosemite. Like others, I can not add a page or merge two PDFs or move pages around. VikingOSX indicated that this was no longer functionality in this version and that we should employ better PDF programs. Excuse me for saying so but that can't be true. The HELP system clearly indicates that you should be able to add a pdf file via the Edit > Insert > Page from File command. This command does exist in the UI. I can execute the command and navigate to the correct file and select it but nothing happens. It makes no sense that Apple would remove the ability to combine pdfs together. This seems like a legitimate bug. I will file a bug report.

Also, Preview is no longer meant to be just a viewer. It has really good capabilities for modifying PDFs that I use every day.

If anyone finds a solution to this problem I would appreciate it if you could let me know.

Thank you for reading.

Susan

Hi guys

Just come across this post so I thought I would check it out

as I often merge pages etc. I selected 3 pages from one doc and dragged them

to another. No problem. I then moved several pages around- again no problem.

I cannot reproduce the difficulties you are having. No help I know but it works for me.

OSX 10.10.1 Mac Pro 6 Coe Late 2013.

Cheers Tom

Hello Tom. Thanks for testing. I am finding that there are some PDFs that exhibit this problem and some that don't. I generally work with PDF documents generated by a 4D database and PDFs that are produced by scanning hardcopy pages. In addition, we some times have to include forms generated by others outside of our control, such as government forms. Further, some times we annotate these pages in Preview.

Testing has shown me that some files are easily integrated with the simple drag and drop feature. Some times the drag and drop won't work at all. In these cases the Edit > Insert page doesn't work either. Some times I can get a page in but the annotation disappears. Last night I tried the setting Preview preference to open all files in the same window and then the Export as PDF command to try to merge them. This resulted in a merged file but a form came in portrait and the annotated text came in landscape.

I'm going to keep trying to nail down exactly what is happening so I can report it to Apple.

I have/had this same issue in just the last couple of days with a file I constantly am merging. I have never had a problem with drag and drop until Yosemite. My issue arouse During the same editing time frame, I went from being able to drag and drop files to not being able to that nor add blank pages. I tried multiple tactics to resolve this issue, but the one I tried that solved my issue was to open the "Print" dialogue and save the file as a PDF. I did this to both files and was able to merge the two PDFs. I did notice that the only annotation I had (which was first made using on Yosemite) is no longer editable, but it is still present. I do not know if I had to do it to both files, or just the one with the annotation.

This was my only case of not being able to merge files, so I have not been able to explore what exactly is the cause or the limitations of this solution. Hope this helps someone else figure more out.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

It seems that the only pdfs that have this problem are the ones that have annotations in them.

Actually Apple has continuously improved Previews ability to edit and annotate. I would not consider dragging and dropping to combine PDF's as "arcane". In every version up to Yosemite, there has been no problem combining PDF's with Preview. I would suggest that everyone provide feedback for this issue.