BASALT · JOURNAL
Preview versus a dedicated PDF application
Preview is better than its reputation and worse than its defenders claim, and the line between is quite precise.
What Preview genuinely does well
Reading, which is most of what anyone does with a PDF. Rotating, reordering, deleting and inserting pages. Combining documents by dragging thumbnails. Filling many forms. Adding a signature, with a genuinely good capture flow. Basic annotation.
For a large share of people this is the entire requirement, and installing anything else is unnecessary.
Where it stops
No OCR. A scanned document stays unsearchable, and this is the most common reason people need something else.
Limited redaction. Its Redaction Selection tool, in macOS 11 Big Sur and later, removes selected text from view, and Apple says the redaction becomes permanent once you close the document, but Apple's guide does not cover metadata or attachments. It can also draw a black rectangle, which is an annotation over text that remains in the file. That difference is the most consequential limitation and the least understood.
No batch processing. Every operation is one document at a time.
Compression is a single Quartz filter with no control and frequently poor results, sometimes larger than the input.
No Bates numbering, no privilege log, no document comparison.
The redaction point, specifically
If you take one thing from this: a black box drawn in Preview does not remove anything. Select the region in the saved file, copy, paste into TextEdit, and the words appear.
The page renders identically to a proper redaction, which is exactly why documents keep going out with recoverable text under black rectangles.
For anything leaving your organisation with material removed, a drawn box is never the tool, and even the Redaction Selection tool needs the saved file checked, because Apple's guide does not say what it does about metadata or attachments.
A reasonable approach
Use Preview for reading, page shuffling and signing. Add command line tools if that suits you. Buy something when you hit a specific need it does not cover, which for most people means OCR, batch work, or redaction you can verify.
Frequently asked questions
Is Preview good enough for PDFs?
For reading, rotating, reordering, deleting and inserting pages, combining documents, filling many forms and signing, yes. It has no OCR, no batch processing and limited compression control, and its redaction tool works on selected text.
Can Preview redact a PDF?
Yes, in macOS 11 Big Sur and later, with its Redaction Selection tool: Apple says it removes selected text from view and that the redaction becomes permanent once you close the document. A black rectangle drawn with its shape tools is different. That is an annotation, and the text underneath stays in the file: copying the region in the saved document recovers the words, despite the page looking identical to a real redaction.
What is the most common reason to move beyond Preview?
OCR. A scanned document stays unsearchable in Preview, and making scans searchable is the capability most people find themselves needing first.
Does Preview compress PDFs well?
Not reliably. It applies a single Quartz filter with no control over resolution or quality, and the result is sometimes larger than the input.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit: nineteen tools in one window covering merge, split, page organisation, compression, OCR, passwords, Bates numbering, forms, signing, watermarks and comparison. Every file is processed on your Mac, and the engine that opens documents holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. Redaction destroys content rather than covering it, and an independent verifier proves the material is gone before a file is written. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, free for the first 24 hours. basaltformac.com, or brew install --cask chipmunk1101/tap/basalt.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.