Preview for Mac no longer copies and pastes pdf pages?
June 1, 2020 11:38 AM   Subscribe

I often have to compose big pdfs from (bits of) smaller pdfs. Preview for Mac used to be really good at this but no longer copies and pastes pdf pages between thumbnail or contact sheet views. Has Preview lost functionality? Is there any way to get its original behaviour back?

I'm on Catalina 10.15.4.

Right now I appear to be able to both cut and copy (the "Edit" menu flashes blue when I use the keyboard shortcut, and the pages selected disappear when cutting) but when I try to paste into the thumbnail or contact sheet views the keyboard shortcut doesn't work and the "Edit > paste" option is greyed out.

I've tried: force quitting pboard from activity monitor; restarting the laptop; copying from and pasting into various different pdfs (including new ones), none of which are in any way protected as far as I can tell.

Insert and delete still work, so there is an incredibly time consuming workaround, but is there a way to have it "just work" like it used to?
posted by chappell, ambrose to Technology (2 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: It seems to work for me if I just drag the page from one thumbnail to the other. Have you tried that?
posted by metahawk at 12:07 PM on June 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


Response by poster: It seems to work for me if I just drag the page from one thumbnail to the other. Have you tried that?

Hey, that works!

Many thanks. For the moment I can't think of any circumstances in which I would need to paste, as opposed to drag and drop, so I suppose I'll stick with that for the future. Thanks again!
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:21 PM on June 1, 2020


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