Mac comes with Preview, and Preview is genuinely brilliant for what it does. It opens PDFs in a tenth of a second, lets you sign with the trackpad, and reorders pages by dragging thumbnails.
It does not edit text. That's where the search for a 'Mac PDF editor' starts — and where most people end up either paying Adobe or installing something dodgy.
What Preview can and can't do
Preview handles annotation (highlight, comment), signatures (trackpad or camera), page management (rotate, reorder, delete), and basic markup. Excellent for those jobs. It cannot edit existing text in a PDF — type a new word over a typo, fix a wrong date. That's the gap.
Flint fills it. Runs in Safari or Chrome, edits the actual text layer, no Acrobat sign-in.
The browser flow
Open Safari (or Chrome). Drag the PDF onto Flint's editor. Tap any text to edit it inline. Add new text boxes for blank fields. Save the result — downloads straight to your Mac.
For signing, draw with trackpad or use a saved signature. For merging, splitting, compressing, converting — same browser, same flow.
When to stick with Preview
For quick annotation, marking up a screenshot, or signing one document with the trackpad, Preview is still the fastest path on Mac. No upload, no waiting. Use Preview for those. Use Flint for actual edits and anything Preview can't handle — text changes, format conversion, compression, redaction.
Drag-and-drop tricks
Safari accepts files dragged from Finder. You can drop a PDF straight from your Desktop onto a Flint browser tab and it loads. Same with Chrome. Downloads go to ~/Downloads by default, but you can change destination in browser settings.
FAQ
Why not just use Preview for everything?
Preview handles annotation and page management beautifully but can't edit underlying PDF text. That's a deliberate Apple choice — Preview is positioned as a viewer with annotation tools, not an editor. For text edits, you need something more.
Is Adobe Acrobat worth it on Mac?
If you do high-volume PDF work daily — legal, accounting, design — Acrobat earns its keep. For everyone else, paying £15+/month for occasional text edits is hard to justify when a free browser tool handles them.
Will my edits survive opening in Preview?
Yes. Flint saves standard PDFs with the changes baked in. Open the result in Preview, Acrobat, or any other PDF reader — the edits show as part of the document.
Preview's great for marking up. For actual editing, open Flint in Safari and change the text directly.