[duck]

I'm a bit disappointed by Preview.app in 10.3, in 10.2 and below, it was able to scale images up or down really nicely, doing bilinear or trilinear filtering ande scaling.. in 10.3, it seems to only pixel-double images, which makes them blocky when you zoom into them.

See here for an example, comparing the same image zoomed in in 10.2's Preview.app.

Fortunately, I have found a way to restore 10.2's Preview.app from the original install CD.

1) Make a temporary directory on your hard drive
2) In the terminal, or exploring package contents in the Finder, copy the file Archive.pax.gz from /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/Essentials.pkg/Contents into your temporary directory
3) Un-gzip the file (gunzip Archive.pax.gz in the terminal)
4) Extract the Application from the pax file using pax ( pax -r ./Applications/Preview.app < Archive.pax
)
5) Look in your temporary directory, and you will see the old Preview.app again.

I like some of the features of the old Preview, notably the scaling and the ability to fit-to-window in a single key combination, but generally the new Preview.app is pretty cool and VERY fast.. I've been glad of it this week, going thru .ps files of people's thesises(sp? ).. it's very fast, and I know not everyone will absolutely want the high-quality scaling back, but I hope this helps people who do.

Standard disclaimer: This seemed to work for me. If it doesn't for you, I'm sorry. All care and no responsibility, etc.

[KidRed]

You're disappointed that zooming into a photo which makes it pixelized is more pixelized in 10.3 then in 10.2?

Either way it's pixelized so I'm not sure I see the point here

[WJMoore]

Originally posted by KidRed:
Either way it's pixelized so I'm not sure I see the point here

Surely you can see that 10.2 Preview does a better job of enlarging the image than the 10.3 one.

Question for duck, Does it still scale down well or is that not as good as 10.2 also?

[clarkgoble]

Sounds like something isn't set right. I was all worried as that was one of my favorite features of Preview. But it works as expected with my copy of Panther.

Do you have "anti-alias text and line art" set?

[Targon]

Originally posted by WJMoore:
Surely you can see that 10.2 Preview does a better job of enlarging the image than the 10.3 one.

Question for duck, Does it still scale down well or is that not as good as 10.2 also?

Dude the thing launches INSTANLY unlike the old POS an its is EXTREMLY FAST now with NO lag at all on my crappy Pismo with no Quartz Extreme, scrolling is silky smooth...

These are massive improvements, i can hardly justify complaining about slight pixelation

maybe it will your issue will be fixed next time the app is updated.

Im jus so elated i can totally ditch Adobe Reader...i have no use for that junk now...Thank's Apple ;-)

Given time Preview will be improved im sure, all i ask that it offers the prefs to open up full screen like Reader, it offered re-sizing in percentage like Reader and every PDF opens up all the time using the 'Fit to Width' setting so that no horizontal scroll bar is created.

[duck]

In answer to the questions, yes is still smooths images that you zoom out from, and yes I've tried it with and without "anti-alias text and line art" set. It works fine with vector images (aka text and line art), but doesn't smooth bitmap ones like jpegs, tiffs etc.

I agree that it's much faster, but loosing unrelated functionality isn't a reasonable tradeoff. And before claiming that this slows it down, remember that in 10.2's preview.app, it didn't smooth images until you had dwelled on them for 1 second, so if you're scrolling thru lots of images in a drawer, it didn't actually smooth until you had stopped on one.

[Arkham_c]

Well, I agree that they should not remove functionality, but at the same time, Preview used to suck, and now it's great. Preview and TextEdit are now actually Dock-worthy, whereas before they were basically useless.

700-page PDF? Preview handles it no-sweat. Before it would scroll about 4-seconds/page. Now it's 20 pages/second.

[fhoubi]

Thx duck. Also the old Preview moves/pans by default. I hate the new Preview.