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I've got a PDF that has something else (actually, another PDF) as an attachment. Like most Mac users I use Preview by default to view PDFs, and Preview gives no indication that I can find that there is an attachment, nor can I figure out how to access the attachment now that I know it's there. I was pretty confused until I tried Adobe Reader which immediately makes it clear that there is an attachment. Am I missing something here or is Preview essentially ignoring attachments?

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    Preview is pretty dumb and does not recognize any "extra" feature which is recognized by other tools like Adobe.
    – Rob
    Jan 2, 2016 at 19:32
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    @Rob - Other way round really… Adobe can do what they like with PDF & Apple has no obligation to keep up with their proprietary format. Google "The demise of Flash" for parallels.
    – Tetsujin
    Jan 2, 2016 at 20:07

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Unfortunately Preview does not support or indicate PDF attachments in a PDF, or any file Preview can open. I suggest you continue to use Adobe Reader for Mac.

You can send your feedback about this to Apple here.

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Preview doesn't support this, but you can extract attachments on the command line using the popper tool pdfdetach. To install poppler with Homebrew:

brew install poppler

To list attachments in a PDF file called doc.pdf:

pdfdetach -list doc.pdf

To extract attachments from a PDF file called doc.pdf:

pdfdetach -saveall doc.pdf
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