Q: Yosemite crippled PDF text annotation with Preview.

Hey, same problem here... Have you also noticed that some graphics/images/diagrams were missing on your PDF slides? I wrote a question about it as well: Preview app "new" annotation capabilities

Please anyone answer us (and please anyone, fix this!!)

This is an international community of volunteers — not Apple badged staff or subcontractors. No one here is going to fix any Apple application that may have a engineering issue. You can provide feedback to Apple on OS X directly.

I am not experiencing any annotation anomalies when existing PDFs are opened in Preview 8 in Yosemite.

So what are you using to annotate your text: I see a text box T button to add text and when you click on another place can you continue to type like in maverick or do you need to click the T button overtime you want to add text. Also if you click on the Aa button in preview what happens... Thank for your reply.

I don't think anyone has solutions to the preview problems - and there are a *lot* of them.  I used to rely heavily on this program for pdf annotation, and now it is basically non-functional for that purpose.  No one at apple seems to care. 

It's more than just the text functions that are a problem. I need to use the other annotation features all the time for creating documentation - ovals, arrows and boxes. All of them have been broken after upgrading to Yosemite. What used to be a simple one step click and drag process to annotate has turned into a minimum of 4 steps that really slows me down. It's as bad as Microsoft Paint now and virtually worthless!

Has anyone found a good alternative?  This was one area where Mac really shined over windows and Apple has totally screwed it up.

What is the forum?

Hi Guys

All functions working for me. Once you click on text in the menu the toolbar

comes up on the document. For example selecting the Italic 'A" will set preferences up for

justification and will stay that way until you change it. The same with all other functions

all work and can be located anywhere on the doc.

Hope this helps a little. Just play around with the tool bar & inspector.

Cheers Tom

I still can't get it to work. What text button are you referring to. Do you mean the T when you press the markup? When I press T the text box shows up in the center of the page and I have to move it all around. wherever I want it. If I need to type something else I have to go back and press T again and realign it again to write. In the older preview all I had to do was press once and then wherever I would click I would get a box and type for the rest of the session.

Solved it!

After much frustration, I realized that the way to recreate preview's old functionality with the same ease is to click the toolbox icon at the far right, then the squiggly pen icon at the far left in the dropdown menu. With this you can underline AND once you've made a line, beginning to type will insert your text next to your annotation!

Still prefer the old way.

Yah, you can access the tools there but the functionality is still goofed up.  Select the "T" for text and it puts a single center justified text box in the middle of the page.  You used to be able to select the "T" draw a box and the text you typed went into the box left justified (as any good text would be).

Just thought I'd check back to see if anyone has found a good alternative they like yet.  I'm still looking and haven't found anything good.  Even Adobe's own PDF products are difficult to work with and I have the fully paid up PRO version or whatever they call it now.

No lightweight, easy to use, able to annotate with ease replacement.  Well, I'll keep on looking.

ReedEzekiel's suggestion worked for me. Not even slightly intuitive, but does seem to make it possible to click and enter text where you want it.  Will also draw lines, etc if you keep left click button down while drawing a line, circle, etc.

Thanks for the extremely helpful post ReedEzekiel!.  Not even slightly intuitive, but it seems to be the correct way to locate a text box where you need it.


1. Open the Markup toolbar by clicking on the toolbox icon.


2. Click on the pen & squiggly line icon.


3. Single left click at the spot that you want a text box; click and release.  The text entry box will open up.


4. If you want to draw with the pen, keep the left button down at the time you click.


The T icon seems to have little use in Yosemite.

The link below provides instructions for annotating a pdf in Yosemite Preview, and additional links at the bottom of this page provide instructions for several other pdf editing capabilities:

Select and copy text in a PDF

Fill out and sign PDF forms

Add, delete, or move pages in a PDF

Crop or rotate a PDF

Add effects to a PDF