Long-time issues with Preview

By Felix, 29 August, 2012

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Hi folks, I use Preview as my default PDF reader for books and documents. Like other native Mac apps Preview seems to be accessible, but I'm always experiencing problems with reading PDFs with it. In OS 10.7 I suffered from blank pages issue, losing a tangible part of information, and now in Mountain Lion VO often reads the word "text" instead of reading content of a document. Could somebody tell me what to do? Is it possible to get round this issue with Preview, or maybe I should change my PDF reader? I

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By Nicolai Svendsen on Friday, August 24, 2012 - 18:40

Hi Felix, When you scroll through a Preview document, it may be worth setting it to COntinuous Scroll with COmmand-1. When you read the Preview window with VoiceOVer, and particularly the text field containing the content of the file, you can try to stop interacting when this issue occurs, then VO-left. Then, VO-right back to the text area. If VoiceOVer begins reading it automatically this time, you can interact with the text area and read line by line using VoiceOver-down arrow. If your text cuts off in the middle of a word, simply stop interacting again and find the Zoom button. This isn't the one within the "Zoom" group, but the one at the top of the window which lets you zoom the window, close or minimize it. This should fix that problem, seems I seem to have it on both Macs. One thing I typically do is hit Command-A to select the entire document, then Command-C to copy it. I usually paste the clipboard's content into a Text Edit document to be able to read it with arrow keys only. I just find it a smoother experience. I hope some of this was helpful. I get the issue you mention also, but this has worked for me. I've already reported it and waiting to hear back.
Thank you Nicolai. Yes this works, but I think I went too far copying and pasting 900 page book into TextEdit. It is very disappointing that Apple hasn't addressed such a critical issue in OS Mountain Lion...