PostView for Mac

User Reviews

• Why does PostView not refresh .ps files properly?

  lol2001/14/2015

  Pros

  The program looks nice and opens fast and all, but....

  Cons

  Why does the refresh / reload button not work? Usually I produce my .ps or .eps files with an external program, and view them in my postscript viewer. PostView however cannot refresh the file that is being viewed (the "File-->Refresh" option does nothing), so I have to EXIT PostView and reopen the file to see the newest version. This is highly inconvenient.

  Summary

  ---

• Nice but...

  C. Maurer9/4/2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br /> PostView is similar to the Apple's Preview with a few added niceties, the purported ability (I have not tried it) to read PostScript files, and one essential feature that Preview lacks, a "Find" command. The want of a "Find" command makes Preview useless for reading long documents, so the real competition for PostView is Adobe's PDF readers. Compared to Acrobat/Adobe Reader, PostView is quicker, fills less of the screen, and generally feels more Mac-like. However, unlike Adobe Reader, PostView cannot show thumbnails and it cannot display the table of contents of or search for text through PDF files that come locked. Also, PostView can select text only in whole lines, à la 1978. Overall PostView makes reading PDF files more pleasant but is less practical than Acrobat Reader for many of them. My wife and I both prefer it enough to use it as our default reader but we find ourselves opening Adobe Reader for a lot of files. PostView might seem prei�wertig even in the face of Adobe's freebees if PostView allowed the user to fill in PDF forms and then permitted something that the freebees do not, saving a form with the text still editable. However, currently PostView cannot fill in PDF forms at all, nor can it even save files under another name (although "Save As PDF..." is available from the PDF menu in the Print dialog)

  ---

• Fast & Useful PDF Viewer

  ncianca6/18/2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I've been using Postview for a couple of months. This is a pretty good PDF viewer, much more functional then Apple's barebones Preview. It defaults to making pages fit the screen and can display 2-up as well. Postview will display the outline for PDF's that have been created with one, which lot's of technical documentation has. The search feature alone is fast and _extremely_ useful and I like how it highlights the line in yellow. It also displays additional information on the document, such as fonts used, creation date, etc. The only things I wish it did (which the author is working on) is to copy the PDF text to clipboard as formatted RTF (his TextLightning program does this) and that it had the option to display thumbnails in the document outline). It also handles PDF's that have landscape/portrait format pages, which I have had problems with in Preview. Postview can also render plain postscript files. I haven't experienced any stability issues and have made it my default PDF viewer as well. Adobe Acrobat might do some of these things, but takes forever to launch and isn't a cocoa native application, which Postview is. I was skeptical at first, but quickly found that I use PostView daily now and have registered. If you need to read lot's of documentation and other PDF's on a regular basis it's well worth the price. BTW, if you are trying it out you can get a temporary key from the author to get rid of the big DEMO text.

  ---