What do you mean it 'doesn't work'? I use Preview to delete pages, convert to black and white, annotate (redact, add signature, circle, highlight) on PDFs weekly.

Ah I see what you mean, I was talking more about “editing” in the sense being able to fill all kinds of form entry and edit them and other text.

For example, I want to have a “check” in a form by clicking, not by dragging an “X” onto the box.

Curious if you have some sample PDFs that are problematic. I'm not doubting you, it's just that I would love to forward them on the the team at Apple that maintain Preview so they can determine what the issue is and address it.

Since CoreGraphics on MacOS has fairly rich PDF support, Preview can do some degree of PDF manipulation: reorder pages, delete pages, insert pages, rotate, crop, annotate, etc.

Clarified: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37113679

> Ah I see what you mean, I was talking more about “editing” in the sense being able to fill all kinds of form entry and edit them and other text.

> For example, I want to have a “check” in a form by clicking, not by dragging an “X” onto the box.

Yeah, "form handling" is something of an esoteric case that is difficult to fully support (well, easy if you're Adobe, I suppose).

Maybe, fortunately, most PDFs I consume are the reading kind.

That’s perfectly fair. But in that case, I’d argue Preview is not much better than the umpteen other apps that can do non-form editing.