Unexpected Behaviour in Preview

Jiahao Chen
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Often, you want to read a PDF document in fullscreen. And you like using Preview with continuous scroll, because it is natural, elegant. So you set the view mode to continuous scroll:

But, when you enter full screen mode, oops. Instead of Continuous Scroll, Preview will show your document in “two pages” mode. You had to manually change the view back to “Continuous Scroll” again. Bothersome!

Problem

The problem behind: in Preview, the default fullscreen view mode is single/two pages. This is understandable: the Apple UX designer probably did this for the use case of presentation. When you present slides in PDF, you expect to only show one page at a time. But this is rather niche use case. If Apple reads the stats they collected from users, “two pages” is likely to be less used than “continuous scroll”. After all, if the current view is continuous scroll, users would also expect continuous scroll view when entering fullscreen mode.

Proposed Solution

  • Add fullscreen default view mode setting to Preview preferences
  • Or/and, stick with the current view mode when entering fullscreen

Status

Submitted to Apple (Nov 1, 2019)

UX & Bugs

Bad UX & Bugs I encountered, and my proposed solutions

Jiahao Chen

Written by

I wish I know the heptapod language…

UX & Bugs

UX & Bugs

Bad UX & Bugs I encountered, and my proposed solutions

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