Today I Learned.

[lucy24]

... that if I resize the window manually, Preview will remember what page of the PDF I was on the next time I open it, the way my Preferences tell it to. If instead I resize automatically by clicking the green button, Preview will revert to the beginning of the document next time I open it, regardless of my Prefs.

I have owned this computer almost 9 years, and only just figured this out.

Sigh.

[tangor]

What critter? They don't all work the same way.

[blend27]

That was a pretty good read too: [nytimes.com...]

[lucy24]

‘I bet you don’t have a computer in your living room.’

Heh. Go back a generation or two earlier, and lots of people had computers (or calculators, which meant the same thing) in their living rooms.

[robzilla]

9 years on the same Mac is not quite what Apple had in mind.

[lucy24]

They've leveled off. Obviously there have been times in the past* when a nine-year-old computer would be impossible, but currently it does everything I need. I dread the day when something dies irreparably and I'm forced to “upgrade” to something that will no longer support the applications I like. (I did have the HD replaced a couple of years ago, and I've been on an external CD drive for ages because $40 from Amazon is less than diagnostics, let alone a new internal drive.) In fact the only reason I got my current machine is that the video on the previous one died--very dramatic-looking visuals--and having it replaced would cost more than the computer was worth.

Preview is one of those built-in programs that is closely tied with the OS, so it hasn't been updated in years. (Safari is the same, and Character Viewer is many, many unicode releases behind. I only just learned they're up to 11. Haha.) But I'm confident there was never anything in the docs that says the Prefs setting for opening on your last-viewed PDF page only works so long as you don't use the green Resize button. Bug or feature?


* When my son was in high school, he got himself a new computer every other year, and passed the old one to me. That worked nicely.